'•/ ' ' 



"■■ 



m HP 






gaga 



' c ■^vBVniiiiH^p 



■MB 



ffl» 



■■■■BBS 
5oSB9H 



MM 



■BHBHWWrfe 

QQUS 



IMM 



BBS 



" I ■lllllillll 

:"> : ■■"■' ■ 











••■•'■'• 





Class -E-^ L- &4 -Q 
Book. ,5 Q>^ 
GopyrightK \ 9iV' /? . 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



3Sp ©rlantto % g>mtt!) 



BALANCE: The Fundamental Verity. Crown 
8vo, #1.25 net. Postage, 9 cents. 

ETERNALISM: A Theory of Infinite Justice. 
Crown 8vo, gilt top, $1.25 net. Postage, 13 
cents. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY, 
Boston & New York. 



BALANCE 

THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 



BALANCE 

The 

Fundamental Verity 

By Orlando J. Smith 

Offering a Key to the fundamental sci- 
entific Interpretations of the System of 
Nature, a Definition of Natural Religion, 
and a consequent Agreement between Sci- 
ence and Religion. 



With an Appendix containing Critical Re- 
views by scientific and religious Writers, and a Reply 
by the Author to his Critics. 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
Houghton, Mifflin and Company 
The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1904 



OCT 3 1904 

|OtMSS A XXo. No. 



COPY B 



— ^J 







S6* 



\°>0 



^ 



COPYRIGHT I904 BY ORLANDO J. SMITH 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



Published October IQ04 



CONTENTS 
I 

The Power of the Sea curbs the Sea — Physi- 
cal Excess turns upon Itself, defeats Itself 
— Excess is defeated also in Chance, into 
which Physical Force does not enter — 
Deficiency balances Excess — Nature's Law 
of Balance i 

II 

Equilibrium, in the Sense of Actual Rest, is 
Unknown — Nature is a State of Ceaseless 
Motion, regulated by Balance 9 

III 

The Scientific Interpretations of Nature point 
to the Single Interpretation, that Balance 
rules the World — ' ' To Every Action there 
is an Equal Reaction," is the Supreme 
Statement 15 

IV 

No Force works aimlessly or wanders away 
into Extinction — Balance is Supreme in 
[ v ] 



CONTENTS 



the Small, as well as in the Great, Processes 
of Nature — Every Physical Transformation 
includes Exact Equivalence and Compensa- 
tion 24 

V 

Man's Part in Nature — Progress by Antag- 
onism — Nature's Process is by Test and 
Trial, by unfolding, changing, ripping up, 
undoing and redoing — Error dies in the 
Struggle 31 

VI 

Action and Reaction in Human Affairs — 
From Paganism to Christianity, to Asceti- 
cism, to the Crusades, to Exploration and 
Commerce — Minor Interactions — Reaction 
from Words and Tones, Speeches and N 
Thoughts 43 

VII 

The Law of Consequences — The Good or 
Evil in Things is discovered by Obser- 
vation of Consequences — Morals are de- 
termined by the Consequences of Human 
Actions 54 

[ vi ] 



CONTENTS 



VIII 
Equivalence is the Test of Truth — Our Stand- 
ards are Instruments of Equivalence — The 
Balancing of Alternatives — Reasoning is an 
Exploration of the Undetermined, a Search 
for Antecedents and Consequences 61 

IX 

Compensation in Human Affairs — Problems 
of Business are Problems of Compensation — 
Right is accomplished by rendering Equiva- 
lents — Duty is a Debt, literally a Due — 
The Golden Rule is a Law of Equivalent 
Exchange 72 

X 

Order is Regulation ; Balance is Regulator. 
Right is Correctness ; Balance is Corrector. 
Justice is Compensation ; Balance is Com- 
pensator — Balance is Single and Supreme, 
without a Mate or Equal 80 

XI 

Natural Justice — Compensation in Human 
Affairs involves a Cycle of Beginning, De- 

[ ™ ] 



CONTENTS 



velopment and Conclusion, as Seed Time, 
Growth and Harvest — Tyranny is an Anti- 
dote for Mean Spiritedness, and Courage is 
the Antidote for Tyranny — Through such 
Rude Alternations do we move forward 84 

XII • 

Justice is Incomplete in the Present Existence 
— Our Life here is as a Broken Part of a 
Broader Life — If Death ends All, then the 
Mass of Mankind must live, toil, suffer and 
die under a Condition of Hopeless Injustice 92 

XIII 

The Essential Meaning of Religion is found in 
the Agreements, and not in the Disagree- 
ments, among Believers — There are Three 
Fundamental Religious Beliefs: (1) That 
the Soul is Accountable for its Actions ; 
(2) That the Soul survives the Death of the 
Body ; (3) In a Supreme Power that rights 
Things 99 

XIV 

The Fundamental Meaning of Religion is 
revealed by its History — Religion recog- 

[ viii ] 



CONTENTS 



nizes that Right rules the World — Science 

recognizes that Balance rules the World — 

Religion and Science are in Harmony, not 

in Conflict 1 19 

XV 

Religion has been misinterpreted and per- 
verted — Science also has been misinter- 
preted and perverted — Religion answers 
for its Perversions as Science, Truth and 
Right answer for their Perversions — The 
Value of a Truth is measured by the Magni- 
tude of its Perversions 124 

XVI 

Measuring the Value of Religion by its Denial 
— Only One School of Thought denies 
Religion — Materialism is the Doctrine that 
Wrong rules the World — Science and Re- 
ligion meet on Grounds of Life, not Death ; 
of Persistence, not Annihilation ; of Right, 
not Wrong ; on the Ground that the Laws 
of Nature are Uniform, not Contradictory 138 

APPENDIX 

Reviews of ' ' Balance " 

By W. H. Mallock 151 

Benjamin Kidd 154 

c « ] 



CONTENTS 



By Amos Emerson Dolbear, LL. D. 158 

Mangasar M. Mangasarian 160 

Edwin Markham 164 

John Grier Hibben, Ph. D. 167 

William Henry Scott, LL. D. 170 

Evander B. McGilvary, Ph. D. 174 

Garrett P. Serviss 176 

Robert Macdougall, Ph. D. 178 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman 182 

Jacob Voorsanger, D. D. 184 

George William Knox, D. D. 185 

George Barker Stevens, LL. D. 189 

George B. Stewart, D. D., LL. D. 191 

Edward L. Curtis, D. D. 194 

William N. Clarke, D. D. 197 

Alexander B. Riggs, D. D. 198 

Gotthard Deutsch, Ph. D. 201 

Thomas C. Hall, D. D. 205 

Philip S. Moxom, D. D. 207 

James S. Stone, D. D. 209 

Howard Agnew Johnston, D. D. 212 

George C. Adams, D. D. 214 

C. Ellis Stevens, LL. D. 216 

Samuel Schulman, D. D. 219 

R. Heber Newton, D. D. 222 

Samuel A. Eliot, D. D. 226 
[ x ] 



CONTENTS 



Answers to Reviewers 
I. Minor Issues 

i . The Rose and the Soul 235 

2. Swift and Slow Compensations 243 

3. " The Fundamental Verity " 248 

4. " Out of Balance" 252 

5. Action without Reaction 254 

6. Every Action is Immortal 258 

7. " The Ultimate Major Premiss" 259 

8. The Galveston Disaster 261 

9. " Minor " or " Fundamental " 264 

II. fundamental Issues 

The First Question 266 

The Second Question 268 

The Third Question 272 

Index 281 



[ * ] 



BALANCE 

THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 



The Power of the Sea curbs the Sea — Physical Ex- 
cess turns upon Itself, defeats Itself — Excess is 
defeated also in Chance, into which Physical Force 
does not enter — Deficiency balances Excess — 
Nature's Law of Balance. 

LONG ISLAND extends into the 
Atlantic Ocean for more than one 
hundred miles to the east of the 
mainland. The ocean, impelled by the pre- 
vailing southwest winds, beats with great 
force upon the island, and would over- 
whelm it but for a series of sand-banks 
which lie next to the sea and resist the 
force of its waves. Inside of these dunes 

[ i i 



BALANCE 



is an almost continuous line of villages, the 
inhabitants of which live in no fear of the 
sea, though they know that one of its storms 
would inundate their low-lying lands if they 
were unprotected by the dunes. 

Against the dunes the ocean wages un- 
ceasing war, retiring a little for rest at low 
tide, renewing the conflict with the turn 
of the tide, and rising often, with the as- 
sistance of the wind, to a furious assault. 
Each day the ocean wastes more force in 
its attacks than was ever exerted upon a 
human battle-field, and each day it suffers 
defeat. 

These barriers against the sea were not 
built by human hands nor planned by hu- 
man thought, though no modern engineer 
could have designed a better protection 
for the land or built with less waste of ma- 
terial or with a closer calculation of the 
strain on the different parts of the line 
of defense. On the western shore of the 
island, where the force of the waves is 
[ * ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

weaker, owing to the proximity of the 
mainland, the barriers of sand lie low; to 
the eastward they rise higher to meet the 
increasing power of the sea. They cut 
straight across large bodies of the sea from 
one point of land to another, that they 
may offer no weak angle to the enemy. 
The dunes are so constructed as to present 
upon their whole front that exact angle to 
the line of the prevailing winds that will 
make each assault of the sea a glancing 
blow. 

It is the power of the sea which forms 
these barriers against its own depreda- 
tions. The force of the waves lifts the sand 
from the bottom of the sea, depositing it 
upon the shore. Each wave carries a little 
sand; the stronger the wave the more sand 
does it carry; the severer the storm, the 
higher does it lift the sand upon the dunes, 
the more impregnably does the ocean 
fortify its shores against itself. Why the 
power of the ocean gives that exact trend 
[ 3 ] 



BALANCE 



to the dunes which makes them strongest, 
is explained by Darwin's theory of natural 
selection: only that form of dune fitted to 
resist the sea could survive. 

The explanation of the dunes is simple, 
the processes of their formation still con- 
tinuing and being open to examination. 
But the meaning of the dunes is less sim- 
ple. They testify to the fact that Nature 
curbs the excesses of the sea by a process 
quite reasonable, indeed unavoidable. The 
force of the sea is turned against the sea. 
This fact, and numerous other facts, sug- 
gest the theory that in some way all excess 
is curbed, or will finally defeat itself; that 
Nature has no pendulum which swings in 
one direction only. • 

In the case of the dunes we have an 
illustration of physical force restraining 
and defeating itself. An example of Na- 
ture's antagonism to excess, into which 
physical force does not enter, is found in 
the laws of chance — what we call chance 
[ 4 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

or luck being quite as much under the 
control of law as other things. In a draw- 
ing of odd and even numbers, the chance 
that the odd number — using the odd for 
illustration, the chances of the even num- 
ber being the same — will emerge in the 
first drawing is one in two; the chance 
that the odd will be drawn a second time 
is one in four; that it will be drawn a third 
time is one in eight; a fourth time one in 
sixteen, and so on. There is one chance in 
1,024 that the odd will be drawn consecu- 
tively ten times; one chance in 1,048,576 
that it will be drawn twenty times; one 
chance in a thousand millions that it will 
be drawn thirty times; one chance in a 
million millions that it will be drawn forty 
times. It is as if Nature should say: 

" Against the consecutive return of the 
odd number, I double the barriers with 
each drawing. It is not alone physical 
excess which produces opposition; it is 
excess in whatever form it appears which 

e 5 ] 



BALANCE 



turns upon itself, defeats itself. And my 
law is no more against excess than against 
deficiency. The barriers against the con- 
secutive return of the odd number force 
the return of the delinquent even number. 
In the long run, the odd and even num- 
bers drawn shall be equalized repeatedly. 
" So far as you overdraw the odd, just 
so far you underdraw the even. If, in ten 
drawings, you have drawn the odd seven 
times, and the even three times, then the 
odd is in excess by two drawings, and 
the even is in deficiency by two drawings 
also. Strictly speaking, nothing is ever out 
of balance in my processes. That which 
is overdone in one direction is underdone 
equally in an opposite direction. Excess 
can exist only through a corresponding 
deficiency, and deficiency can exist only 
through a corresponding excess. A defi- 
ciency in crops is balanced by an excess 
in prices; an excess in crops is balanced 
by a deficiency in prices. Other balances, 
[ 6 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

corrective in their nature, rise up also. A 
deficiency in crops, with the correspond- 
ing high prices, stimulates efforts, such as 
better cultivation and increased planting, 
to overcome the deficiency, while an ex- 
cess of crops sets forces at work to repress 
over-production. 

" In my domain, all things are genera- 
tive. Out of maturity comes infancy, out 
of darkness light, out of force new forms. 
Thought breeds, wrong breeds, good 
breeds. Excess and deficiency breed also, 
each begetting its own destroyer." 

We live in a world in which, if science 
and philosophy do not err, there is cease- 
less motion everywhere, and perfect rest 
nowhere. There is motion in the heart of 
the granite mountain, in the minutest por- 
tions of the human body; motion great 
and insignificant, perceptible and imper- 
ceptible, disastrous and beneficent. Is this 
motion — which is as persistent in human 
consciousness as in matter — under no re- 
[ 7 ] 



BALANCE 



straint, no order, no law? or is it under 
the control of some power or principle 
which curbs excess, restrains deficiency, 
restores balance, grants compensation? 
Whether the return of equivalence and 
compensation is not fundamental in Na- 
ture, alike in physics and in the human 
soul — whether the rational foundation for 
man's hope for a future life, and for his 
belief in the rightness of the world-order, 
should not be sought for in the supremacy 
of equivalence and compensation — this is 
the subject of my inquiry, in which I shall 
deal briefly with the relations of balance 
to physical science, and pass promptly to 
the larger question, the relation of com- 
pensation to human affairs. 



[ 8 ] 



II 

Equilibrium, in the Sense of Actual Rest, is Un- 
known — Nature is a State of Ceaseless Motion, 
regulated by Balance. 

WHY do I use the word balance 
instead of equilibrium? Is not 
equilibrium more accurate than 
balance? We observe much of stability, 
poise and equivalence in and about us, 
which we call equilibrium. But we have 
not observed -perfect equilibrium. The 
word perfect is often misused. Nor have 
the physicists, with their finest balances 
and instruments of precision, found per- 
fect equilibrium. They have invented 
scales which, placed in a vacuum, isolated 
as far as possible from external disturb- 
ance, weigh with remarkable fineness. 
But they have invented no scales and dis- 
covered no conditions which enable them 
to weigh with infinite fineness. The in- 
[ 9 ] 



BALANCE 



finite eludes us. If they should improve 
their balances so that they may weigh one 
of the motes which we see in a sunbeam, 
still they would not reach perfect equi- 
librium. They must weigh a millionth of 
the mote and a millionth of that millionth, 
and so on to infinity, the unreachable. 

The problem of perfect equilibrium faces 
infinite perturbations on all sides. There 
is no perfect vacuum for the scales. Our 
government at Washington preserves our 
standard measures in an even temperature. 
The evenness of temperature can be main- 
tained to one degree, perhaps to the hun- 
dredth of a degree or to the thousandth, 
but not to the millionth or to infinite fine- 
ness. 

Moreover, the maintenance of a perfect 
equilibrium would be in conflict with the 
scientific assumption that motion is cease- 
less. Perfect equilibrium maintained would 
be perfect rest, that which exists nowhere, 
according to the theory of the continuity 

[ 10 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

of motion and the persistence of force. 
Well it is with us and with the world that 
perfect rest does not exist! If the blood 
in my body should stand at perfect equi- 
librium for a moment, I would die. For 
motion is life; its cessation would be ex- 
tinction. 

Equilibrium may be compared with the 
present in time, which, strictly speaking, 
is that point in which the past and future 
meet — a point which is really impercep- 
tible, as the reader will realize if he will 
pause and try to hold or catch it. It is 
gone before we can grasp it; it is swifter 
than the thought which would compre- 
hend it. 

As the present is a fact in time, though 
elusive, so we may assume that two 
weights, nearly equal, swinging in a bal- 
ance, will pass and repass the point of 
equilibrium, even of perfect equilibrium, 
with each alternate movement of the arms 
of the balance. As the present is a point 
[ " ] 



BALANCE 



which we gain only to lose it, so equi- 
librium is a point or line which mo- 
tion crosses and recrosses without resting 
upon it. 

When scientific men have occasion to 
speak of equilibrium with exactitude, they 
use the qualifying term "approximate/' 
meaning thereby relative or practical equi- 
librium, nearness to perfect equilibrium, a 
good state of balance. And this is what we 
find — a good state of balance — in Na- 
ture, notwithstanding her ceaseless motion 
and transformations, some transformations 
being slow, requiring millions of years, 
some as swift as the transformation of the 
future into the past, some open to our sight, 
some imperceptible, the greatest being 
sometimes the least perceptible to our 
senses, as is the motion of the earth in its 
ceaseless journey around the sun at the rate 
of eighteen miles a second, one thousand 
and eighty miles a minute - — as if one 
should fly from New York to Yonkers in 
[ » 1 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

one second, to Albany in ten seconds, to 
Buffalo in thirty seconds, to Chicago in one 
minute, to San Francisco in three minutes 
— one thousand times faster than an ex- 
press train, fifty times the speed of a rifle- 
bullet. We are disturbed often by our own ' 
little projects, inventions and affairs, but 
we are not fearful that the bulky earth will 
come to harm in its mad course, nor would 
we know that it moves at such speed, or 
that it moves at all, if the astronomers had 
not demonstrated the fact. Nor does Her- 
schel's discovery that the solar system is 
moving at the rate of about twenty thou- 
sand miles an hour toward the constella- 
tion Lyra disturb us, nor do we worry over 
the apparently inevitable collision to follow 
this movement, for the astronomers assure 
us that that danger is remote, and that it 
will come, if it comes at all, long after this 
earth has ceased to be habitable. We are 
persuaded that the astronomers have dis- 
covered regularity and precision in the 
[ i3 ] 



BALANCE 



movements of the heavenly bodies, that 
their forecasts of these movements are 
trustworthy, and that Nature, in the large, 
in her greater and grander manifestations* 
is ruled by order. 



[ 14 ] 



Ill 

The Scientific Interpretations of Nature point to 
the Single Interpretation, that Balance rules the 
World — "To Every Action there is an Equal 
Reaction," is the Supreme Statement. 

MODERN science accepts with 
practical unanimity eight inter- 
pretations of the system of Na- 
ture, which are recognized usually as fun- 
damental : 

i. To every action there is an equal 
and opposite reaction. 

" If fire doth heate water, the water re- 
actethagaine . . . upon the fire, and cooleth 
it," says Sir K. Digby (a. d. 1644). The 
wagon pulls against the horse with the 
same strain that the horse pulls against the 
wagon. The knapsack exacts from the sol- 
dier who carries it an expenditure of force 
equal to its weight. Let me strike a stone 
wall with a gloved fist, and it will give 
[ *s ] 



BALANCE 



back a gloved blow in response. The wall 
will be gloved, even as my fist is gloved, 
at the point of contact. Let me strike hard 
with bare knuckles, and I shall be con- 
vinced that Nature gives even to senseless 
things some powers of resistance, of de- 
fense, even of resentment. If I should be 
thrown upon the stone wall by accident, 
still the wall will return the blow with 
equal force. Nature's ways are exact — 
strain for strain, blow for blow — with no 
allowance for intention. 

" To every action there is an equal and 
opposite reaction," is Newton's Third Law 
of Motion, which is accepted as the fun- 
damental axiom of physics. In this law 
Newton has expressed also, I believe, the 
fundamental law of Nature — that action 
and reaction are ceaseless, equivalent and 
compensatory. 

2. That effects follow causes in un- 
broken succession. 

Strictly speaking, the axiom of causa- 
[ I* ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

tion is only another expression of the axiom 
" that reaction equals action." Effects are 
the consequences of causes, the reactions 
from causes, the equivalents of causes. 

3. Gravitation — that every two bodies 
or ^portions of matter in the universe 
attract each other with a force propor- 
tional directly to the quantity of matter 
they contain and inversely to the squares 
of their distances. 

Gravitation, if considered as a force of 
attraction only, is a force which balances 
its opposite, repulsion. The attraction of 
the sun balances the momentum which 
would otherwise project the earth on a 
straight line into space. This balance holds 
the earth steadily in its course around the 
sun. Opposite forces of attraction and re- 
pulsion, centripetence and centrifugence, 
exist in the world in its greatest and small- 
est parts, alike in constellations and in 
atoms. Science is compelled to recognize 
repulsion as being as universal as attrac- 
[ '7 ] 



BALANCE 



tion. To account for these contrary forces 
has so far baffled investigation, Newton's 
great discovery accounting only in part. 
Science knows only this — that these 
forces exist; that they meet, offset, neu- 
tralize and regulate each other, sometimes 
mildly or imperceptibly, sometimes vio- 
lently and with fearful convulsions, and 
that in their influences, contacts, struggles 
and wars they hold all things in balance. 

4. Evolution — including its opposite, 
devolution or dissolution — that the fit 
advance and the unfit decline, advance- 
ment depending upon adaptability, and 
decline upon inadaptability, to environ- 
ment. 

There are seeds that will grow in a sand- 
bank, others must have loam; some will 
grow only on mountain heights, others on 
low levels; some in low temperatures, 
others in high; some organisms can live 
only in the water, others die in the water; 
some are self protected against the ele- 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

ments, others must be housed and clothed 
— and so on through numberless varia- 
tions in requirements. Evolution is the 
balancing of organisms with their sur- 
rounding conditions, influences and forces. 
Those that are fit — that is, in harmony 
with their environment — will survive; 
those that are unfit will fail. As Herbert 
Spencer says: 

" Evolution under all its aspects, general and spe- 
cial, is an advance towards equilibrium. We have 
seen that the theoretical limit towards which the 
integration and differentiation of every aggregate 
advances, is a state of balance between all the forces to 
which its parts are subject, and the forces which its 
parts oppose to them" — Biology, ii. 537. 

5. That matter is indestructible. 

6. That force is -persistent and inde- 
structible. 

Mr. Spencer has said (First Principles, 

p. 182) that " the verification of the truth 

that matter is indestructible " rests only 

upon " a tacit assumption of it." " A tacit 

[ '9 ] 



BALANCE 



assumption," with no rational basis for the 
assumption, would be no verification; it 
would be a guess. The truth that matter 
and force are indestructible rests upon a 
better ground than an assumption; it is 
the inevitable corollary of the truth, " To 
every action there is an equal and opposite 
reaction." If there could be a single case 
in which matter and force are annihilated, 
then Newton's axiom would be untrue, 
for, in that case, reaction would fail to fol- 
low action. The turning of something into 
nothing, by the destruction of matter or 
force, would break the succession of cause 
and effect, of action and reaction ; and con- 
sequently the theories of the indestructi- 
bility of matter and of force have their 
roots in Newton's axiom, in the great law 
of consequences, of equivalence, of com- 
pensation, of balance. 

7. That motion is ceaseless, and con- 
sequently that transformation is contin- 
uous. 

[ ™ ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

This, like the theories of the inde- 
structibility of matter and of force, rests 
upon Newton's axiom. If motion should 
cease, then there could be no reaction 
for " every action." The modern theories 
of the persistence of matter and force, 
and of the ceaselessness of motion, are 
extensions, interpretations and necessary 
consequences of the fundamental truth 
that " every action " is followed by a re- 
action. 

8. The laws and ways of Nature are 
uniform and harmonious. 

Uniform means of one form, agreement, 
consistency. Harmony means concord, the 
just adaptation of parts to each other, 
agreement also, unison. We observe this 
uniformity, harmony and agreement to a 
marked degree in the fundamental expla- 
nations of Nature which we are now con- 
sidering. They teach us that there is nei- 
ther halt nor break in Nature's processes; 
that motion is ceaseless, transformation con- 
[ » ] 



BALANCE 



tinuous, force persistent, matter indestruc- 
tible; that in these ceaseless transforma- 
tions repulsion balances attraction, effects 
balance causes — in short, that reaction 
equals action, that balance attends and 
controls transformation. 

We cannot assume uniformity and har- 
mony without also assuming a ground of 
uniformity and harmony. What is Nature's 
one form, or rule, or way, or law, or prin- 
ciple, upon which her uniformities and 
harmonies rest? Of the fundamental ex- 
planations of science, one — Newton's law 
of ceaseless equivalence and compensa- 
tion, " To every action there is an equal 
and opposite reaction " — is the imperious 
and supreme statement, the others being 
subsidiary or complementary to it, or ex- 
planatory of it. 

These fundamental conceptions of sci- 
ence point distinctly and with emphasis to 
this higher and single generalization — 
that Balance rules the world. Balance is 

e " ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

the key that unlocks them, the word that 
explains them, the principle that unifies 
them. 



[ *3 ] 



IV 

No Force works aimlessly or wanders away into 
Extinction — Balance is Supreme in the Small, as 
well as in the Great, Processes of Nature — Every 
Physical Transformation includes Exact Equiva- 
lence and Compensation. 

"XX 7ITHOUT the axiom that ac- 
\f \/ tion and reaction are equal and 
opposite, astronomy could not 
make its exact predictions/' says Spencer 
(First Principles, p. 193). As astronomy 
discerns the operation of the laws of bal- 
ance in the remotest regions accessible to 
human vision, and in the most tremendous 
phenomena, so chemistry discovers the 
same accurate adjustments among the 
smallest particles of matter of which we 
have any knowledge. 

Lavoisier is called the founder of mod- 
ern chemistry. That which distinguishes 
his work from the work of his predeces- 

c *+ ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

sors is the more accurate measurement of 
the materials and forces which are involved 
in chemical changes, and a more orderly 
view of these phenomena as perfectly bal- 
anced interactions. His work destroyed 
the theory of " phlogiston/' which was in- 
consistent with natural balance because it 
introduced a mystic agent — " phlogiston, 
the spirit of fire " — having unnatural prop- 
erties contradictory of the law of action 
and reaction. 

The problem of oxidation puzzled chem- 
ists in Lavoisier's day. The rapid action 
of fire and the slow rusting of a metal 
were seen to be closely akin, but the cause 
was elusive. It was necessary to learn that 
the essential of both processes is oxygen, 
coming from the air or some other source ; 
and that there is no actual loss or gain in 
the process of oxidation. This truth led 
to the broader knowledge that, in every 
chemical transformation, whatever disap- 
pears in one form, reappears in another; 
[ *5 ] 



BALANCE 



that every manifestation of force is due 
to a disturbance of balance among the 
minute, invisible particles which we call 
atoms; that no force works aimlessly or 
wanders away into extinction. 

The most recent discoveries in thermo- 
chemistry, in electro-chemistry, in the 
phenomena of solution, and in the realm 
of molecular structure, depend upon the 
same principle : that any apparent super- 
abundance or deficiency indicates error, 
and that the truth will always reveal a per- 
fect correspondence, equivalence, and rec- 
titude of law. 

The history of chemical experimentation 
is full of the most perfect illustrations of 
the principle of equivalence, which finds 
its simplest expression in the universal 
practice of chemists in writing down every 
chemical reaction as an equation: So much 
of this plus so much of that equals the 
result. 

We shall search in vain for any demon- 
[ *6 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

strated truth concerning the system of Na- 
ture, for any law, rule or axiom of physics, 
which does not rest fundamentally upon 
the equivalence of action and reaction, of 
cause and effect. " The straight line joining 
the sun and planet must pass over equal 
areas in equal times," is Kepler's law. " At 
any point in a fluid at rest the pressure is 
equal in all directions," is Pascal's prin- 
ciple. "A body immersed in a fluid is 
buoyed up by a force equal to the weight 
of the fluid displaced," is the principle of 
Archimedes. " The angles of incidence 
and reflection are in the same plane, and 
are equal," is the law of reflection. " The 
reciprocal of the principal focal length is 
equal to the sum of the reciprocals of any 
two conjugate focal lengths," is the law of 
converging lenses. " The current is equal 
to the electro-motive force divided by the 
resistance," is Ohm's law. "The disap- 
pearance of a definite amount of mechanical 
energy is accompanied by the production 
[ *7 ] 



BALANCE 



of an equivalent amount of heat/' is Joule's 
principle. Observe how perfectly these 
and the other principles and laws of phys- 
ics agree with Newton's law of motion : 
" To every action there is an equal and op- 
posite reaction." 

The universality of equivalence is 
broadly expressed in the law of the con- 
servation of energy: "When one form of 
energy disappears, its exact equivalent 
in another form always takes its -place." 
This law, accepted by modern science, 
leaves no ground for the assumption that 
there can be a failure of equivalence in 
motion or transformation. 

Can we say that the equivalents which 
return persistently in motion and transfor- 
mation are compensatory ? Yes; the re- 
turn of an exact equivalent is exact com- 
pensation. Heat is the compensation for 
the fuel that produces it; electricity is the 
compensation for the energy that is trans- 
formed into it; one molecule of water is 
[ *8 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

the compensation for two atoms of hydro- 
gen and one atom of oxygen, A definite 
amount of matter or force pays for exactly 
the same amount in another form. That 
which disappears and that which succeeds 
are mutually compensatory. Fuel pays for 
heat, and heat pays for fuel. The account 
balances perfectly. Nature has no profit 
and loss account, no bad debts, no failures 
in compensation. 

The assumption that anything can exist 
in the physical world without exact com- 
pensation appeals to the scorn alike of 
science and of common sense. Our patent 
office in Washington refuses to consider 
devices to produce perpetual motion, not 
because that office would place an arbi- 
trary limit on the possibilities of mechan- 
ical invention, but because effect without 
cause, power without compensation, is im- 
possible. 

We shall be justified in the conclusion 
that the principle of balance presides over 
[ *9 ] 



BALANCE 



the processes of Nature in the small as 
well as in the large — alike in atoms, sat- 
ellites and suns — and that every trans- 
formation of matter and force, great or 
insignificant, includes the return of exact 
equivalents and compensation* 



[ 30 ] 



Man's Part in Nature — Progress by Antagonism — 
Nature's Process is by Test and Trial, by unfold- 
ing, changing, ripping up, undoing and redoing — 
Error dies in the Struggle. 

APART from the world of physics, 
and yet inextricably entangled 
with the physical, is a realm in 
which exist thought, hope, imagination, 
reason, comedy, pathos, tragedy, friend- 
ship and love, revenge and hate, honor 
and humiliation, right and wrong, pleasure 
and laughter, pain, agony and despair; a 
world which is included in Nature, the 
same as mineral and vegetable, matter and 
motion, atom and sun. The thought, hopes, 
ideals and fate of man belong as truly to 
Nature as wood, muck, coal or stone. 

The conscious part of man — that 
which sees, feels and comprehends — is 
of higher interest and importance than 
[ 3i ] 



BALANCE 



anything purely physical, Newton com- 
prehended gravitation, but gravitation 
could not comprehend Newton. Priestley 
discovered oxygen, but oxygen never dis- 
covered Priestley. The astronomers have 
seen far-off stars, but no star will ever 
see an astronomer. Our great laws and 
principles, our immensities, our planets 
and suns — they are senseless, they know 
nothing, see nothing, feel nothing. But 
man, frail, weak and defective though he 
be, can see, feel and comprehend. . 

So far as man is physical, we know 
that he is subject to the same laws that 
control other manifestations of matter and 
force. But what of the conscious part 
of man? Is that subject to the same laws 
of action and reaction, cause and effect, 
equivalence and compensation, that rule 
in the physical world? Is there one law 
for physical interaction, and a different 
law, or no law, for intellectual and moral 
interactions ? Does compensation exist for 
[ 3* ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

matter and force only, or does it exist also 
for the human soul? 

The polarities of Nature, and the inter- 
actions between them, are quite as pro- 
nounced in human life as in physics; in- 
deed, the polarities extend beyond the 
physical and human into the abstract, as 
in odd and even numbers. The polarities 
are sometimes antagonistic, sometimes re- 
ciprocal, and always, I believe, mutually 
corrective. 

" An inevitable dualism bisects Nature," 
says Emerson, " so that each thing is a 
half and suggests another thing to make 
it whole — as, spirit, matter; man, woman; 
odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out; 
upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay. . . . 
The same dualism underlies the nature 
and condition of man." 

Plato perceived the same law of polar- 
ity in " the generation of contraries, of 
death out of life, and life out of death, of 
recomposition and decomposition." 
[ 33 ] 



BALANCE 



Man faces on all sides the polarities of 
Nature, some of which — such as wet and 
dry, hot and cold, work and rest, pleasure 
and pain — were as apparent in savagery 
as they are in civilization. With increas- 
ing knowledge man perceives more and 
more of these dualities and invents new 
words to express them. Roget gives, in 
his " Thesaurus," more than twelve thou- 
sand words of opposite meaning. " There 
exist comparatively few words of a gen- 
eral character to which no correlative term, 
either of negation or of opposition, can be 
assigned," says Roget. 

Hegel held the theory of " progress by 
antagonism w — " that forms which are op- 
posed are really complementary or neces- 
sary to each other, and their conflict is 
limited by the unity which they express 
and which ultimately must subordinate 
them all to itself." 

Sometimes we recognize that a stranger 
is a teacher or a minister by the tone of 
[ 34 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

his voice. The peculiarity in the voice is 
partly, but not wholly, oratorical. It is the 
voice of the orator who expects no answer, 
who anticipates that no one will "talk 
back " on equal terms — the voice undis- 
ciplined by antagonism. We may observe 
also the absence of the discipline of an- 
tagonism in the voices and manners of 
children, and of those who have too much 
or too little self assertion — in the mean 
and the haughty, the servile and the arro- 
gant. The countryman adjusts himself 
with some trouble to the ways of the city, 
and the city man to the ways of the farm 
or forest, because these changes bring new 
antagonisms. We meet new antagonisms 
with every change from infancy to the 
grave — in learning to walk and to care for 
ourselves; in going first to school; with 
each new study; in the cares, duties and 
responsibilities which come with maturity; 
in heat and cold, dust and rain; in conta- 
gions; in the numberless enemies which 
[ 35 ] 



BALANCE 



lurk in the water we drink and in the aif 
we breathe; in old age, "that malady 
which no physician has ever cured." 

Life is filled with issues — moral, intel- 
lectual, political, social, philosophical, 
commercial, physical — some being grave 
and others trivial. The mind of a man 
is a field of battle in which contending 
ideas, forces and interests meet and clash, 
each one seeking for the weak spots in the 
other. A thought or proposal arouses an- 
tagonistic thoughts and considerations, 
and a school of thought begets antagonis- 
tic schools. Monotheism rises up against 
polytheism, heterodoxy against orthodoxy, 
rationalism against superstition, epicu- 
reanism against stoicism, realism against 
idealism, monism against dualism, will 
against fatalism, tolerance against intoler- 
ance, equality against privilege, radicalism 
against conservatism, trades unions against 
employers, farmers against middlemen, 
middlemen against combinations, combina- 
[ 36 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

tions against competition. Our people are 
in perpetual antagonism concerning na- 
tional, state or local policies. In these con- 
flicts, as in all other conflicts, the stronger 
is victorious. Balance forbids a victory 
of weakness over strength. By strength I 
mean power, whether it be mental or phys- 
ical, honest or base. A man is stronger 
than a horse through intelligence; one 
man rules a thousand or a million men 
through superior will, courage, wisdom or 
devotion, or by taking advantage of their 
ignorance, fanaticism or superstition. In 
our political contests the victory goes with 
the majority, which may be in accordance 
with right, or may be moved by misunder- 
standing or passion. The victory of wrong 
will in time produce its reaction, which 
will be favorable to right. "When bad 
becomes bad enough, then right returns." 
" Nothing is settled until it is settled 
right." 

The history of civilization is the history 
[ 37 ] 



BALANCE 



of the settlement of issues in accordance 
with their merits, of numberless victories 
of tolerance over intolerance, of reason 
over ignorance, of right over wrong. Nor 
is it true, as is sometimes assumed, that 
there has been no philosophical progress. 
The old contest between stoic and epicu- 
rean — in which some of the greatest 
minds of antiquity participated for five or 
six centuries — has been definitely settled. 
The verdict is expressed in the meaning 
which the two words have acquired in our 
language. The word stoic is applied to the 
strong, emotionless, self denying, uncon- 
querable; epicurean to the fastidious, lux- 
urious, self indulgent, weak. And modern 
thought recognizes that, while the two 
words represent opposite tendencies in hu- 
man nature — one of which is in the main 
noble and the other in the main ignoble 
— neither has the substance upon which 
to build a philosophy of life. Nor is it 
likely that a philosophy of life can be built 
[ 38 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

upon one of two antagonistic ideas or prin- 
ciples. 

The meaning taken on by our words 
"cynic" and "sophist" also records the final 
verdict concerning the merits of two an- 
cient schools of philosophy. Antisthenes, 
Diogenes and Menippus, Protagoras, Gor- 
gias and Hippias — all important figures 
in their time ■ — were cynics or sophists, 
but common sense has disposed of their 
errors. Experience indicates that the 
theories which belittle human nature, and 
becloud the issues between right and 
wrong, will ultimately become obnoxious 
— that the very terms in which they are 
expressed will grow into words of ill 
meaning. 

The failure to settle intellectual conflicts 
is not due so much to the misunderstand- 
ing of principles as to the misunderstanding 
of facts. No one doubts that rationalism is 
right and superstition wrong, but men dis- 
agree concerning what is rational and what 
[ 39 ] 



BALANCE 



is superstitious. Wrong is not defended 
as wrong, but on the ground that it is 
right. The struggle of thought is to dis- 
tinguish right from wrong. 

In many issues there is truth on both 
sides, and a settlement is delayed by the 
difficulty in determining the true bal- 
ance. Sometimes the truth on one side is 
perfectly balanced by the truth on the 
other side, and it turns out that there is 
no issue, as in the old conflict between 
inductive and deductive reasoning. We 
now know that each process is sound 
when correctly used, and that both pro- 
cesses are essential in reasoning. There 
are no particulars that do not harmonize 
with a generalization, and there is no gen- 
eralization that does not agree with its 
underlying facts. 

Life is a struggle. Wars end, but the 

war of the race — the antagonism of 

thought, the strife between men, between 

man and the forces external to him, within 

[ 4o ] . 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

the soul of the individual — ends not save 
it be with extinction. 

Error gains many a temporary triumph, 
but the final victory is with truth. There 
is substance in truth that in the last bal- 
ance outweighs error. 

Nature's process is by test and trial, by 
unfolding, changing, ripping up," undoing, 
redoing. By contrast and conflict she tries 
sincerity and treachery, honor and dis- 
honor, fitness and unfitness, courage and 
cowardice, truth and error. The conflict 
of ideas — between social and political 
systems, and between creeds and philoso- 
phies — is as rude as the conflict between 
the sea and land. Error dies in the struggle. 

The fact, however, that the state of 
Nature is dualistic in so far as it is a state 
of conflict or alternation, should not be 
accepted as carrying the conclusion that 
Nature is dualistic in a fundamental sense. 

The polarities of Nature would, if con- 
sidered alone, represent Nature as a state 

c 41 ] 



BALANCE 



of confusion and anarchy. Since, how- 
ever, order reigns in the midst of the con- 
fusion, we must accept the alternations 
and conflicts of Nature as being compen- 
satory, and not as anarchic; as being un- 
der the control of law which, in its last 
analysis, is single — monistic, not dualistic 
— and master of all other forces, even of 
gravitation. Water, impelled by gravita- 
tion, falls to the earth, runs through the 
rivulets, brooks and rivers to the sea. 
But it will ascend again to the clouds, 
again refresh the land, again return to the 
clouds, continuing alternately to yield to 
and then to elude the gravitation of the 
earth. " What we call gravitation and fancy 
ultimate is one fork of a mightier stream 
for which we have yet no name," says 
Emerson. I venture to suggest that the 
" mightier stream " is named Balance. 



[ 4* ] 



VI 

Action and Reaction in Human Affairs — From 
Paganism to Christianity, to Asceticism, to the 
Crusades, to Exploration and Commerce — Minor 
Interactions — Reaction from Words and Tones, 
Speeches and Thoughts. 

ERROR and evil are located in defi- 
ciency or excess. Even excess in 
virtue is evil, an excess of humility 
being abjectness; of courage, rashness; of 
prudence, cowardice; of patience, indif- 
ference; of economy, parsimony; of gen- 
erosity, waste; of deference, obsequious- 
ness. And so also an excess of learning is 
pedantry; of ease, indolence; of comfort, 
self indulgence; of zeal, fanaticism. Right 
and justice are found in moderation, in the 
golden mean — in the true balance — be- 
tween overdoing and underdoing, going too 
fast and too slow. 

Philosophical history deals mainly with 
[ 43 ] 



BALANCE 



the record of excess, and the reactions 
from excess, in human affairs. Observe 
how Lecky traces the culmination of the 
brutality and cruelty of Rome to the glad- 
iatorial games, in which the spectacle of 
men fighting to the death in the arena — 
where it is said that more than one hun- 
dred thousand perished — delighted vast 
audiences, including the women of the 
first city in the civilized world. It was a 
monk, Telemachus, who finally rushed 
between the combatants, and " his blood 
was the last that stained the arena." The 
immediate reaction from cruelty is repug- 
nance, aversion, detestation. Disgust for 
pagan savagery opened the way for Chris- 
tianity, the religion of kindness, humility, 
peace and fraternity — the exact opposite 
of the pride, arrogance and ferocity of pagan 
Rome. The Christians praised peace, con- 
demned war, abolished slavery, founded 
the first hospitals, and sought to alleviate 
human sorrow and suffering with zeal 
[ 44 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

which is without parallel. One extreme 
follows another in human affairs, like the 
swing of a pendulum. The reaction from 
excess is excess in an opposite direction. 
Excess in moral reformations takes the 
form often of fanaticism. Christian fanati- 
cism developed in time a monstrous form 
of asceticism, glorified the hermit life, beg- 
gary, humiliation, flagellation, self torture, 
the neglect of cleanliness and the laws of 
self preservation, the breaking of family 
ties, and other forms of senseless sacri- 
fice. Pagan excess led to the sacrifice of 
others for sport; Christian excess to the 
sacrifice of self to gain the favor of superhu- 
man powers. The hero of the pagans was 
Caesar, who had risen to fame on the corpses 
of 1,100,000 men. The hero of the age of 
asceticism was St. Simeon Stylites, who 
bound himself with ropes to putrefy his 
flesh; who, it is said, stood on one leg for 
a year and sat on a pillar for thirty years 
bending in ceaseless prayer. And what 
[ 45 ] 



BALANCE 



should we expect as the reaction from as- 
ceticism? Again the opposite — the age of 
chivalry and the wars of the Crusades. The 
ascetics had condemned war, good clothes 
and the love of women. The knights of 
chivalry rode with love tokens on their 
breasts, in brilliant apparel, to rescue the 
tomb of Christ from the Moslem. In the 
wars of the Crusades 2,000,000 Christians 
perished. 

Through the Crusades the peoples of 
Europe became better acquainted with 
one another, and the use of ships was 
greatly increased. Consequently the reac- 
tion from the age of the Crusades was the 
age of commerce, and out of commerce 
grew exploration, the discovery of Amer- 
ica, the mapping of the globe. Aversion to 
the intolerance of the Middle Ages pro- 
duced the tolerance of later times. A sim- 
ple mechanical contrivance, the printing 
press, facilitated the liberation of thought. 
The heroes of the later centuries are the 
[ 46 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

discoverers, such as Columbus, Newton 
and Darwin. 

Beneath these great interactions the his- 
torian observes minor interactions, cover- 
ing shorter periods in the affairs of nations 
and communities, as in France when the 
indifference of the old regime to the rights 
of man led to the period of liberty, equal- 
ity and fraternity, and the excesses of the 
Revolution to the horrors of the guillotine. 
Dickens, in "A Tale of Two Cities/' 
says: 

"All the devouring and insatiate monsters im- 
agined since imagination could record itself are fused 
in the one realization, Guillotine. And yet there is 
not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, 
a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which 
will grow to maturity under conditions more certain 
than those that have produced this horror. Crush 
humanity out of shape once more, under similar ham- 
mers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured 
forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and 
oppression over again, and it will surely yield the 
same fruit according to its kind. 

" Six tumbrils roll along the streets. Change these 
[ 47 ] 



BALANCE 



back again to what they were, thou powerful en- 
chanter, Time, and they shall be seen to be the car- 
riages of absolute monarchs, the equipages of feudal 
nobles, the toilettes of flaring Jezebels, the churches 
that are not my Father's house but dens of thieves, 
the huts of millions of starving peasants ! " 

The atrocities of the French Revolu- 
tion led to the rise of the empire, and the 
excesses of Napoleon to his destruction. 
Victor Hugo, in " Les Miserables," says 
of Bonaparte at Waterloo : 

" Another series of facts was preparing, in which 
Napoleon had no longer a place : the ill will of events 
had been displayed long previously. It was time for 
this vast man to fall ; his excessive weight in human 
destiny disturbed the balance. This individual alone 
was of more account than the universal group : such 
plethoras of human vitality concentrated in a single 
head — the world, mounting to one man's brain — 
would be mortal to civilization if they endured. The 
moment had arrived for the incorruptible supreme 
equity to reflect, and it is probable that the principles 
and elements on which the regular gravitations of 
the moral order as of the material world depend, 
complained. Streaming blood, overcrowded grave- 

[ 48 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

yards, mothers in tears, are formidable pleaders. 
When the earth is suffering from an excessive burden, 
there are mysterious groans from the shadow, which 
the abyss hears. Napoleon had been denounced in 
infinitude, and his fall was decided. Waterloo is not 
a battle, but a transformation of the universe." 

Flint, in his " Philosophy of History/' 
says: 

" History always participates in some measure of 
philosophy ; for events are always connected accord- 
ing to some real or ideal principle, either of efficient 
or final causation. . . . The more the mind of the 
historian is awake and active, the more, of course, 
it is impelled to go in search of the connection be- 
tween causes and effects, between occurrences and 
tendencies." 

The best chart of industrial conditions in 
past years in the United States is the chart 
of immigration — the coming of foreigners 
being in proportion to the opportunities 
for labor. The first great wave of immi- 
gration was consequent upon the period of 
prosperity which began in 1845, an d which 
was stimulated later by the gold discov- 
[ 49 ] 



BALANCE 



eries of California and the beginning of 
railroad construction. The tide of immi- 
gration declined with the panic of 1857 
and through the civil war; it rose after the 
war, declined with the panic of 1873, rose 
by leaps and bounds with the prosperity 
which began in 1879, declined with the 
business depression of 1883-86, rose again, 
declined with the panic of 1893, and rose 
to the highest point on record in 1903 as 
the result of the preceding prosperity. 

We recognize the consequences of busi- 
ness prosperity in other and numerous 
forms — in contentment, comfort, satisfac- 
tion with the party in power, improved 
wages, increasing luxury and happiness; 
while the results of declining trade are 
btisiness failures, reduced wages, precari- 
ous employment, discontent with social 
and political conditions, want, despair, 
suicide. 

The influence of the law of action and 
reaction can be traced more clearly in 

c 5° ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

those everyday human affairs which come 
under our individual observation than in 
the greater movements of mankind which 
are often imperfectly recorded. We act, 
and are acted upon. The people we meet 
make an impression on us; the impres- 
sion may be for the moment or it may 
last through life. Bloom, fragrance, grace, 
harmony, beauty, majesty, affect us agree- 
ably; deformity, imbecility, distress, cru- 
elty, affect us unpleasantly. The plea of 
the unfortunate, the thought of our visitor, 
the opinion in the newspaper, the issues 
of the time, impress us in accordance with 
our moods or natures. Certain words, 
tones, sights, awaken echoes within us of 
old happiness or pain. 

There are words and tones which pro- 
duce beautiful reactions — the lullabies of 
the mother, the endearments of the lover, 
the voice of sympathy, the enchantment 
of music, the messages of the poets, the 
trumpet calls to honor and duty. And 
[ 5i ] 



BALANCE 



there are words which produce misun- 
derstanding, confusion, aversion, anger — 
the words of whining, complaining, fault- 
finding ; of envy, jealousy, slander; of 
malice, intolerance, brutality. 

The response to the public speaker is 
reciprocal to his power. If he be dull, the 
hearers are wearied; if he be convincing, 
courageous, forceful, the audience will 
kindle, and he may rouse them to laugh- 
ter or tears, to indignation or fury, to 
generosity or sacrifice. He may change 
the opinions and convictions of some and 
the course of the lives of others; he may 
even save a city from slaughter or make 
a state. If his thought be really great, it 
may live through many ages, stirring gen- 
eration after generation. The reaction of 
moral effort may be prolonged; it may 
even gain force with time, indicating its 
connection with some stupendous primal 
energy. The echo of a great physical con- 
vulsion dies quickly, but the echo of the 
[ 52 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

words of Confucius and Buddha, of Plato, 
Seneca and Christ, still lives. The voice 
of Socrates before his judges kindles men 
whose ancestors were untamed savages 
when Socrates spoke. Buildings decay, 
monuments fall, rivers run dry, races de- 
cline, but a great thought suffers from no 
impairment or decrepitude ; it has the gift 
of immortal youth and strength. 



[ 53 ] 



VII 

The Law of Consequences — The Good or Evil in 
Things is discovered by Observation of Conse- 
quences — Morals are determined by the Con- 
sequences of Human Actions. 

A REACTION is the consequence 
of an action, an effect is the con- 
sequence of a cause, a result is 
the consequence of an antecedent. It is 
evident that the words reaction, effect, 
result and consequence express different 
manifestations of one law, usually called 
the Law of Causation, though it would 
be, I believe, more correctly named the 
Law of Consequences. 

We shall understand more clearly the 
interactions in human affairs when we 
recognize that the meaning of the words 
reaction, effect and result is included in 
the word consequence. We may doubt the 
importance of reaction in our affairs, but 
[ 54 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

we shall not doubt the importance of con- 
sequences. 

We are compelled to give considera- 
tion to consequences in the most trivial 
affairs. One has consequences in view 
when he strikes a match, sets a pot to 
boil, plants a seed, pulls a weed, sharpens 
a pencil, mends a fence. Shall I take an 
umbrella? I balance the danger of rain 
against the annoyance of the umbrella, and 
decide accordingly. Shall I change my 
coat? take another cup of coffee? walk 
or ride? Each question will be decided 
in accordance with my estimate of the 
balance of results. In considering pos- 
sible advantages or disadvantages, gains 
or losses, we are balancing consequences, 
endeavoring to anticipate and weigh the 
results of our actions. 

Regret is usually a reminder of a neglect 
or misjudgment of consequences, while 
repentance and reformation indicate a wak- 
ing up concerning consequences. Our in- 
[ 55 ] 



BALANCE 



terest, curiosity, anxieties, fears, hopes 
and ambitions are concentrated upon con- 
sequences. We seek advice when we are 
doubtful about consequences. Precepts 
and examples elucidate consequences. We 
work and rest, eat and drink, scheme and 
plan, spend and save, for consequences. 
We indulge or sacrifice ourselves for con- 
sequences. Caesar expended a million lives 
for earthly glory; St. Simeon Stylites 
scourged himself for eternal gain. Our 
actions, so far as they are controlled by 
reason, are determined by our judgment 
of consequences. 

"What? Does the tramp, the drunk- 
ard, the thief, consider consequences ? n 

The tramp roves because he prefers the 
freedom and pleasures of his life to the re- 
sults of other ways. The drunkard drinks 
because the near pleasure outbalances in 
his mind the more remote pain. The thief 
steals because he values the quick and 
easy gain more than he fears detection. 
[ 56 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

Each man judges consequences by his 
own lights, which are distorted often by 
greed, animalism, ignorance. 

The lesson of consequences which the 
individual often learns slowly and imper- 
fectly, the sound business organizations 
acquire quickly and enforce by discipline. 
The salesmen in a successful store are 
characterized by tidiness, promptness and 
a desire to please; the employees of the 
important railroads are not even permitted 
to answer insult with insult. The indus- 
try that is intelligently managed will avoid 
misrepresentation and deception, knowing 
that a reputation for truth and fairness is 
vital to continuous success. The shrewd- 
est maxims of trade are built upon the 
observation of consequences. 

That mind is the strongest which has 
the clearest judgment of consequences. 
The fools are those who know little about 
consequences. The child must be guarded 
because it is ignorant of consequences. 
[ 57 ] 



BALANCE 



What we know of narcotics, stimulants, 
antidotes, hygiene, surgery, chemistry, ag- 
riculture, mechanics, commerce, culture, 
we know through the observation of con- 
sequences. The best razor, plough, sani- 
tary system, plan of social betterment, 
is that which produces the best results. 
Knowledge, learning and experience deal 
wholly with cause and consequence. The 
science of astronomy seeks to compre- 
hend the heavenly bodies and their influ- 
ences upon each other. The science of 
chemistry explains the consequences of 
chemical action. The science of political 
economy aims to distinguish and mark the 
good and evil results of different systems 
of land tenure, taxation, trade and finance. 
The science of government would deter- 
mine what political system is best for a 
people. The science of war seeks to know 
what arms, equipments, forces and ma- 
noeuvres will inflict the greatest injury 
upon the enemy with a minimum of ex- 

[ 58 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

penditure. The science of language deals 
with the utility of words, pronunciation and 
forms of expression. And so on through 
the whole of human experience, knowl- 
edge seeks to distinguish that which has 
the best results from that which has infe- 
rior or evil results. 

Our ideas of right and wrong are due 
to the nature of the responses to human 
actions. How do we know that truth is 
better than falsehood? Because we are 
better pleased with ourselves when we 
speak truthfully than when we lie; be- 
cause truth is essential to understanding; 
because we despise lying in others; be- 
cause lying leads to confusion, uncertainty, 
enmity, and to other evil consequences. 
And so also we have formed a judg- 
ment of loyalty and treachery, cruelty and 
kindness, virtue and vice, by their conse- 
quences. 

Our laws, customs and commandments 
would not prove to us that truth is better 
[ 59 ] 



BALANCE 



than lying if our own experience did not 
confirm it. The Decalogue is effective 
only so far as Nature corroborates it. 

Our common conceptions of morality 
are the results of the observation of human 
actions and their consequences — of cause 
and effect, of action and reaction. We 
know that certain actions are right and 
others wrong, as we know that bread is 
good and straw bad for food; that light 
clothing is more useful in summer than 
in winter; that cleanliness is better than 
filthiness ; that the way to walk is forward, 
not backward; that mirth is pleasanter 
than grief. 

As the value of a machine or imple- 
ment is shown in its working, and the 
value of a tree by its fruit, so the merit or 
demerit of food, drink, medicine, acts and 
thoughts is determined by their results, 
reactions or effects — by their conse- 
quences. 



e 60 ] 



VIII 

Equivalence is the Test of Truth — Our Standards 
are Instruments of Equivalence — The Balancing 
of Alternatives — Reasoning is an Exploration of 
the Undetermined, a Search for Antecedents and 
Consequences. 

IN mathematics, our one exact science, 
equivalence is the test of truth. Con- 
sider the unalterable nature of the 
truth expressed in the simplest equation: 
one plus one equals two. Nothing can 
change this result. That which is so im- 
pregnable is the principle of equivalence. 
One added to one equals two, and can equal 
nothing else. 

Equivalence is the test of truth also in 
the physical sciences, so far as our knowl- 
edge is exact, as in chemical combinations. 
Our standards — the cent and dollar; 
pint and gallon; ounce, pound and ton; 
inch, foot and mile ■ — are instruments 
[ 61 ] 



BALANCE 



of equivalence. We measure accurately 
only by equivalents. In the absence of a 
standard, we fall back on resemblance, 
analogy, comparison, or some other sub- 
stitute for an equivalent. 

The chief substitute, used alike by the 
humblest and highest minds, is the balanc- 
ing of alternatives — the measuring of one 
thing by its opposite. The rules of logic are 
unknown to the mass of mankind, but no 
one possessed of intelligence is unfamiliar 
with the process of balancing alternatives. 
Even the animals use it when they choose 
between two paths, or two actions, as be- 
tween fight and flight. Men use it in every 
dilemma, great or small, from the choice 
between the simplest actions, to the issue 
of life or death. Is the thing under con- 
sideration good or bad? Shall I vote for 
A or B? Shall I act now or postpone? 
Shall I take a risk? Shall I stop or go on? 
Shall I change my course ? Shall I do this 
or that? In these and other dilemmas, we 
[ 62 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

balance the consequences of one alterna- 
tive against the other, and choose what ap- 
pears to be the better. Facing death in two 
forms, we choose the better way. Balanc- 
ing alternatives, one will jump from a high 
window to the pavement to escape fire. 

The moral dilemmas presented to us are 
not always limited to a clear choice be- 
tween right and wrong. It is wrong to 
steal, but should one starve, or permit those 
dependent on him to starve, rather than 
steal ? It is right to tell the truth, but should 
one tell the truth when it involves the be- 
trayal of his comrades, his country, his fam- 
ily ? It is wrong to deceive, but would not 
one be justified in deceiving the enemy 
who would destroy him? It is wrong to 
kill, but may not one kill in self defense? 

The problem of morals presses con- 
stantly upon the human race, presenting 
to each individual in turn new trials, 
difficulties and repugnant choices. Each 
must, to a large degree, choose his own 
[ 63 ] 



BALANCE 



way, fight his own battle. These are the 
facts which confuse our ethical counselors. 
It is not possible to act always in exact 
harmony with our moral code. If one is 
so placed that he can save his mother from 
starvation only by stealing, he will violate 
the fifth commandment if he permits her 
to starve, and he will violate the eighth 
commandment if he chooses to steal. The 
choice between two evils often comes to 
the individual suddenly and imperatively. 
He must act at once, rendering a deci- 
sion for which there is often no precedent 
known to him. The Decalogue which he 
can recite, the philosophical analysis of the 
evolution of ethics, do not aid him. 

He who is thus tried, and who desires 
to do right, will choose the course which 
is least evil. He will balance the alterna- 
tives, exactly as does the one who jumps 
to the pavement rather than remain in the 
burning building. 

Other alternatives crowd upon us. Na- 
[ 64 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

ture presents to us almost continuously 
the choice between near pleasure and re- 
mote good. Shall I rest now and enjoy 
myself, or shall I work, postponing my en- 
joyment? Shall I give the years of my 
youth to study or to play? Shall I accept 
present privation that I may in time enjoy 
security? Shall I consider my own inter- 
ests wholly, or shall I make a sacrifice for 
others ? Shall I stay at home in comfort, 
or shall I risk my life for my country? 
Shall I disown my faith, or shall I accept 
death by torture? Numberless are the 
choices between the near and the remote 
good which men must make. The lower 
men show little appreciation of the remote 
good, save as they are inspired by the 
instinct of self preservation. The higher 
men are distinguished by their high valua- 
tion of the remote good — by provision 
for the future, by attention to health, by 
interest in culture, by sound investments, 
by building business, houses and charac- 
[ 6 S ] 



BALANCE 



ter substantially, by a high estimate of 
honor and duty. 

Reasoning is an exploration of the unde- 
termined — an elucidation of the unknown 
through the known or the discoverable. 
There is no difficulty in measuring with 
exact standards to measure by, and with 
something tangible to measure — for ex- 
ample, in determining the number of cubic 
feet in a room, or the power of an engine. 
Reasoning, which is easy so far as it deals 
with exact equivalents, becomes difficult 
when applied to things the equivalents of 
which are unknown. The mind instinc- 
tively seeks for the unknown equivalents, 
and finds them in antecedents or conse- 
quences. Chemical experimentation is a 
search for consequences; bacteriological 
investigation is a search for antecedents. 
The search in both cases is for equivalents 
by which we may determine the nature and 
meaning of the thing tried, or its relations 
to other things. 

[ 66 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

The syllogism in logic is a form by 
which one may advance from antecedents 
to a consequent. The essence of a syllo- 
gism is this : that a premise includes all of 
its consequences. If a premise be true, its 
consequences will be true; if it be false, 
its consequences will be false. Conclu- 
sions, corollaries, deductions, judgments, 
inferences, discoveries and estimates are 
consequences — each following from an 
antecedent or antecedents. 

The failure to consider, or to estimate 
correctly, the consequences of a position 
is fatal in reasoning. This is illustrated 
in the case of a number of schools of 
thought holding conclusions concerning 
the most important questions of life which 
are in contradiction to human experience 
or to reason — for example, idealism and 
fatalism. 

That form of idealism which denies the 
existence of matter, has been supported 
by many famous minds, in neglect of its 
[ 67 ] 



BALANCE 



consequences, for we know that no idealist 
could act as if matter had no existence — 
could live and move about in contempt of 
mud, stone walls, mountains, rivers, seas, 
snow, ice, fire, food, poison, gunpowder, 
clothing, beds. 

Fatalism, known under different names, 
as foreordination, predestination, necessity, 
determinism — the theory, in its logical 
form, that man is an automaton, an instru- 
ment moved and played upon by external 
influences or powers — has been defended 
by many eminent theologians, philosophers 
and other thinkers, including some distin- 
guished modern scientists. Observe, in 
the face of the intellectual prominence 
of the fatalists, how completely the con- 
sequences of fatalism refute that theory. 
One convinces himself that fatalism is 
true, that he and all other men are au- 
tomatons. He must convince himself 
through reason. But an automaton can- 
not reason. He convinces himself through 
[ 68 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

reason that he is an automaton without 
reason ! 

The method of reasoning justified by ex- 
perience, used by men in contact with the 
problems and difficulties of life, whether 
the problems and difficulties be the most 
simple or the most complex, is the method 
of common sense — the testing of ante- 
cedents by consequents, and of conse- 
quents by antecedents. 

We judge the value of a machine, a 
field, a cow, a pig, by what it will pro- 
duce; a picture, a scene, a play, a spec- 
tacle, a poem, a song, a book, a thought, 
by what it gives back to us; a creed, an 
opinion, a plan, a policy, a system, a phi- 
losophy, a deduction, a conclusion, by 
what we believe its consequences are or 
will be. 

We estimate the value of a nation, a 
race, by its history, its antecedent record. 
The calculations of future events by the 
astronomers are based on antecedent ex- 

c 6 9 ] 



BALANCE 



perience. We must judge what will be by 
what has been. We search alike for good 
seeds and evil germs that we may propa- 
gate the one, and destroy the other. 

To comprehend the unknown seed, we 
plant it and observe its consequences. To 
comprehend an unexplained crime, we 
search for its antecedents. The process 
of reasoning, even of the most abstract 
reasoning, is the same. An advance in 
knowledge, from the humblest step to 
the highest scientific achievement, comes 
from the investigation of antecedents or 
consequences. 

As a physical interaction includes cause 
and effect, and perfect equivalence be- 
tween them, so does the mental interaction 
which we call reasoning include antecedent 
and consequence, and perfect equivalence 
between them. We are unable to think of 
antecedents and consequences as being 
other than exact — of peaches as growing 
on apple trees, or of acorns that produce 

c 70 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

potatoes. The measure of truth and false- 
hood will be found in their equivalents — 
in their antecedents and consequences. 



[ 7i ] 



IX 

Compensation in Human Affairs — Problems of Busi- 
ness are Problems of Compensation — Right is 
accomplished by rendering Equivalents — Duty 
is a Debt, literally a Due — The Golden Rule is a 
Law of Equivalent Exchange. 

IN primitive times trade was by bar- 
ter — a fish for a rabbit, a shell for a 
cocoanut, or service for service — a 
direct exchange of articles or labor. Mod- 
ern commerce is still correctly designated 
as " trade'' or " exchange/' though methods 
are improved. Money, drafts, credit and 
transportation are instrumentalities of ex- 
change, of balance. I exchange my labor 
for money, which is good in exchange for 
whatever may be in the market. A debt 
is a deferred balance. A promissory note 
is an agreement to settle a balance. A 
bank check is a draft upon a balance in 
bank to close or reduce a balance else- 
[ 7* ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

where. Systems of accounting are agencies 
of balance. The correctness of bookkeep- 
ing is tested by a balance. 

Interest is the penalty for a postponed 
payment, for a delayed balance. The busi- 
ness done on a cash basis is balanced 
continuously; the business done on credit 
is out of balance, involving risk. The de- 
lay of compensation is dangerous. Fail- 
ures, bankruptcies and business panics 
are due to debt, the neglect of compensa- 
tion. 

Life consists almost wholly of buying, 
selling, paying. There are no gifts, noth- 
ing that does not call for an equivalent. 
If we cannot pay for gifts in kind, we must 
pay in gratitude or service, or we shall 
rank as moral bankrupts. 

If I would have a good situation, I must 
pay for it not only in labor, but in prompt- 
ness, intelligence, faithfulness and good 
manners. If I would have good service, I 
must pay not only in money, but in con- 
[ 73 ] 



BALANCE 



sideration, recognition, appreciation, fair- 
ness. I can hold no one to me if I mis- 
use him. 

All things are to be had for the buying. 
Would you have friends? Then pay the 
price. The price of friendship is to be 
worthy of friendship. The price of glory 
is to do something glorious. The price of 
shame is to do something shameful. 

Friendship, glory, honor, admiration, 
courage, infamy, contempt, hatred, are all 
in the market-place for sale at a price. 
We are buying and selling these things 
constantly as we will. Even beauty is for 
sale. Plain women can gain beauty by cul- 
tivating grace, animation, pleasant speech, 
intelligence, helpfulness, courage or good 
will. Beauty is not in the features alone; 
it is in the soul also. 

Good will buys good will, friendliness 
buys friendship, confidence begets confi- 
dence, service rewards service ; and hate 
pays for hate, suspicion for suspicion, 
[ 74 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

treachery for treachery, contempt for 
ingratitude, slovenliness, laziness and 

tying- 

We plant a shrub, a rosebush, an orchard, 

with the expectation that they will pay us 

back. We build roads, mend harness and 

patch the roof with the same expectation. 

We will trust even these unconscious 

things to pay their debts. 

Some of our investments are good, and 
some are bad. The good qualities we 
acquire — moderation, industry, courtesy, 
order, patience, candor — are sound in- 
vestments. Our evil institutions and habits 
are bad investments, involving us in losses. 
We become debtors to them, and they are 
exacting creditors, forcing payment in full 
in money and labor, and sometimes in 
blood, agony, tears, humiliation or shame. 

We recently had in this country the in- 
stitution of chattel slavery, which we had 
cultivated for two hundred years. Prepar- 
atory to going out of business, this insti- 
[ 75 ] 



BALANCE 



tution called on us for final settlement. 
Our indebtedness, which proved to be 
large — amounting to more than half a 
million lives and over six thousand mil- 
lion dollars — was paid in full. It seems 
strange that our institution of slavery, 
with no standing among the great powers 
of the earth, should have been able to col- 
lect such an indemnity in blood, treasure 
and pain from an enlightened people, tak- 
ing a drop of blood from the dominant 
race " for every drop drawn by the lash." 

We are administering compensation 
continually in our praise and blame of our 
fellow men — in applause to a poet or dis- 
coverer, in condemnation of the greedy and 
rapacious, in aversion to injustice, in love 
to our benefactors. 

" Each day," as Emerson says, u is a day 
of judgment." We are judged continually, 
and usually correctly, by our associates and 
friends. And we are constantly paying 
penalties to or receiving rewards from 

c 76 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

our judges — penalties in the indifference, 
dislike, contempt and detestation of our 
fellows; rewards in their appreciation, 
confidence, good will and love. 

The vulgar receive no respect, the heart- 
less no sympathy, the rapacious no affec- 
tion. It is better to be a dog that has earned 
a little love than Caesar in triumph, his 
enemies on his chariot wheels. 

Compensation is in the frost on the win- 
dow pane, and in the sunset of gold and 
crimson and purple, which reward the ar- 
tistic sense in the minds even of the for- 
lorn and poor; in the hope in the hearts 
of men which makes life endurable; in the 
first cry of the infant which rewards the 
mother's agony. 

Right is accomplished by rendering 
equivalents. Duty is a debt, literally a due, 
which we owe to ourselves or to others. 
The Golden Rule is a perfect law of equiv- 
alent exchange, and Kant's " categorical 
imperative " — " Act according to that 
[ 77 ] 



BALANCE 



maxim only which you can wish at the 
same time to become the universal law " 
— is also an exact law of reciprocity. 

" The real first truth of morality," says 
Victor Cousin, " is justice. It is justice, 
therefore, and not duty, that strictly de- 
serves the name of a principle." " Univer- 
sal justice," says Aristotle, " includes all 
virtue." " Justice is the greatest good," 
says Plato. 

Justice is the foundation of retribution, 
vindication, reparation, obligation, reci- 
procity, accountability, duty. Justice is 
compensation. 

Everything in Nature, conscious and un- 
conscious, animate and inanimate, is busily 
engaged in paying its debts. By what sys- 
tem is this perfect accounting made? We 
see no books, observe no .management, and 
yet the numberless settlements are made 
with as much exactness as if each one were 
superintended by a group of experts, com- 
bining more of knowledge and justice than 
[ 78 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

are possessed by all of the mathemati- 
cians, scientists, thinkers, philosophers and 
judges in the world. We cannot explain 
this accounting on the theory of chance 
or accident; we must conclude that it is 
the consequence of a supreme power or 
principle of order, right and justice which 
regulates the affairs of the world. 



[ 79 ] 



X 

Order is Regulation ; Balance is Regulator. Right 
is Correctness; Balance is Corrector. Justice is 
Compensation; Balance is Compensator — Balance 
is Single and Supreme, without a Mate or Equal. 

BALANCE is a word in which are 
concentrated, I hold, the higher 
meanings of the words order, right 
and justice. 

The high and more general meanings of 
the word order — such as sequence, regu- 
larity of succession and method, right ar- 
rangement — fit well into the word balance. 
In other words, balance may include the 
higher meanings of order, but order does 
not include all of balance. We shall not 
find the fundamental explanations of the 
system of Nature in order. Effect, it is 
true, follows cause, and reaction follows 
action, in an orderly manner. This is a 
process, a general way of Nature. Such a 
[ 80 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

statement, however, gives out little light. 
But when we say that effect balances 
cause, that reaction balances action, then 
we make a distinct advance toward unity 
and light. 

Right is a word of broad and noble 
meaning, but it also does not fit com- 
pletely into the fundamental explanations 
of the system of Nature, or apply as per- 
fectly as does the word balance to every 
interaction. 

The figure illustrating justice is a goddess 
blindfolded, holding the scales of balance 
in her hands. Justice is balance in human 
affairs. Balance is wider than justice, since 
it includes justice and more than justice. 
There is no justice in the moon, where there 
is no conscious life, but balance is there. 

Balance includes order, right and jus- 
tice, but none of the latter can include 
completely the former. Balance is an 
active, governing principle, supreme, cen- 
tral, automatic. Order is regulation; bal- 
[ 81 ] 



BALANCE 



ance is regulator. Right is correctness; 
balance is corrector. Justice is compen- 
sation; balance is compensator. 

As we advance in knowledge we per- 
ceive more and more of duality in the 
processes of Nature. Doubtless we shall 
know in time that all processes, save the 
supreme process, are double. We know 
now that the law of causation is misnamed; 
it is really the law of cause and effect. 
And so also the law of evolution is actually 
the law of evolution and devolution. That 
the fit survive is only a half truth, the 
other half being this — that the unfit perish. 
That matter and force are indestructible 
is also a half of the complete truth that 
matter and force are indestructible and 
uncreatable. The law of consequences is 
really the law of antecedents and conse- 
quences, though I shall continue, for the 
sake of brevity, to designate it as single. 

As Roget has shown, nearly all of the 
important words in our language are bal- 
[ 82 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

anced by words of opposite meaning. 
Even honor is balanced by dishonor, vir- 
tue by vice, right by wrong. But where 
shall we find the obverse of balance, its 
other half, mate or contrary, the force 
which matches balance on equal terms? 
I know of no such energy or principle. It 
has no name; no word in our language 
expresses such meaning. We say that re- 
action balances action, attraction balances 
repulsion, order balances disorder, and so 
on, but what balances Balance? These 
words in which I attempt to consider the 
balancing of balance become ridiculous, 
indicating the absurdity of the thought 
that balance is itself subject to balance. 
Balance is single and supreme, without a 
mate or equal. 



[ 83 ] 



XI 



Natural Justice — Compensation in Human Affairs 
involves a Cycle of Beginning, Development and 
Conclusion, as Seed Time, Growth and Harvest — 
Tyranny is an Antidote for Mean Spiritedness, and 
Courage is the Antidote for Tyranny — Through 
such Rude Alternations do we move forward. 



H 



^ UT what of the failures of balance, 
of the awful accidents and terrible 
convulsions of Nature in which 
balance seems to be absent, or at least 
tardy or inefficient? " 

The convulsions of Nature are not 
violations of balance ; they are the phe- 
nomena connected with Nature's great 
interactions. Lightning is the shock ac- 
companying the establishing of equipoise 
between two clouds, or between a cloud 
and the earth. An earthquake is the 
equalization of an internal pressure upon 
the crust of the earth. And so cyclones, 
I 8 4 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

volcanic eruptions, floods, droughts, epi- 
demics and other disturbances are the 
consequences of the antecedents which 
produced them. 

"Do you admit, then, that things are 
not always in balance, and that man can 
defy balance ? " 

Man cannot defy balance. His acts must 
produce equivalent consequences. The use 
of rotten harness, imperfect boilers, defect- 
ive flues, bad plumbing, weak buildings 
and faulty machinery will invite disaster. 
Whenever the internal pressure overbal- 
ances the strength of the boiler, we have 
what we call an accident, though it is 
not really an accident, being the result 
of ignorance or of a miscalculation of 
forces. 

We invite evil consequences in overeat- 
ing and overdrinking, in overworking and 
underworking, in neglecting sanitary pre- 
cautions, in worrying and straining beyond 
our strength, thereby receiving many a 
[ *5 ] 



BALANCE 



hard rap and sometimes a deathblow. We 
live in the kingdom of equivalence and 
compensation. Its laws are very strict, 
and we cannot evade them. If we violate 
them, we must pay the penalty. 

To say that compensation is defeated 
because it requires time for completion is 
as unreasonable as if one should say that a 
journey is endless because its conclusion 
is not reached in an instant, or that the 
seed planted this morning is a failure be- 
cause it does not produce an ear of corn 
this afternoon. We do not comprehend 
the Rocky Mountains through the first 
glimpse of one of its peaks, nor is the 
whole process of evolution to be found in 
one of Darwin's lines. And compensation 
also is revealed only by the whole of it 
— in its completeness — and not in one 
glimpse or line. 

The processes of compensation in human 
affairs involve usually a cycle of begin- 
ning, development and conclusion — as 
[ 86 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

seed time, growth and harvest — for com- 
pletion. A headache, separated from the 
indulgence that preceded it, is apparently 
wrong; connected with its cause, it is 
right. To judge a thing, we must know 
its antecedents and consequences. We 
cannot determine the exact status of a 
wrong, or of what appears to be a wrong, 
unless we know that antecedents do not 
justify it, or that consequences will not 
rectify it. 

At the end of all our reasoning con- 
cerning the fundamental questions of life, 
we must choose between two alternatives 
— either (i) all things are in the process 
of being righted, or (2) the world-order 
is hopelessly wrong. 

The correction of excess and deficiency 
is the province of balance. It would be 
impossible to make a list of the influences 
and forces which antagonize excess or de- 
ficiency, for we do not know, and doubt- 
less never will know, all of them, as they 
[ 87 ] 



BALANCE 



are included in the most subtle and minute 
phenomena of action and reaction, of cause 
and effect. Human law, for illustration, is 
designed to prevent excess or deficiency 

— not only statute law and common law, 
but laws of decorum, ceremony, courtesy, 
etiquette, custom, usage, manners, trade. 
These laws are more or less defective, 
themselves subject to excess or deficiency 

— as laws of despotism, privilege, monop- 
oly, fashion — and sadly require the regu- 
lation of balance. To one who suffers from 
defective laws, the force that corrects them 
seems to be far off or even non-existent. 
We should remember, however, that bal- 
ance works sometimes secretly, as in the 
imperceptible rhythm said to exist in all 
motion, and sometimes silently through 
centuries, as in the transformation of sun- 
shine into coal. 

The world has doubtless suffered more 
from tyranny in its many forms than from 
any other perversion of order in human 
[ 88 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

affairs. Yet we may perceive much of 
balance in the origin, development and 
conclusion even of tyranny. The tyrant 
rules because he is the stronger. Strength 
will rule over weakness. No protest or 
complaint, no weeping or wailing, will 
change that fact. Tyranny exists by the 
consent of the oppressed. Those are en- 
slaved who are willing to be owned, who 
are too ignorant or cowardly to resist, or 
who consent to temporize. We enslaved 
the negro because he lacked spirit, but we 
failed to enslave the Indian. The Indian 
accepted death, and declined slavery. 
There were negroes, too, who declined 
slavery, and found freedom in the north 
or in death. 

There is something in tyranny that 
rouses the spirit of men, even of dull and 
cowardly men. It may be that we owe 
more to our tyrants than to our benevo- 
lent autocracies, which have soothed and 
lulled us into indifference and inglorious 
[ 89 ] 



BALANCE 



content. Tyranny is an antidote for mean 
spiritedness, and courage is the antidote 
for tyranny. Through these rude alterna- 
tions do we move forward. We would 
value freedom little if we knew nothing of 
oppression. 

As for the tyrant, he thinks of poison 
when he eats and drinks; he sees danger 
in the sullen faces of his slaves. He lives 
in dread of assassination, and often dies 
by it. He sees danger even where there is 
no danger. He cuts a sorry figure in his- 
tory. His life is uneasy and his memory 
is detested. There are no happy tyrants. 
The great tyrants earn immortal infamy; 
the small ones secure the hatred of those 
who know them. The account, as we see it, 
balances rudely ; doubtless it would bal- 
ance to a hair if we could trace all of the 
remote antecedents and consequences of 
tyranny. Doubtless also, if we could trace 
the antecedents and consequences of all 
other evils, we should know that there is 
[ 9o ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

no trouble which time will not heal, no 
wrong which is not in the process of being 
righted. 

The universe, is under the reign of law, 
which is everywhere — in things mean and 
minute as well as in things noble and great. 
So far as we have come into an under- 
standing of these laws, we have found 
none defective. 

No sound philosophy can concede that 
a law of Nature can be out of balance or 
in any way less than true and perfect. 
When we advance a theory to the point 
where it would prove that a law of Nature 
is out of balance and defective, we should 
know that the conclusion is wrong; that 
it is our reasoning, and not the law, that is 
out of balance and defective. 



[ 9i ] 



XII 

Justice is Incomplete in the Present Existence — Our 
Life here is as a Broken Part of a Broader Life — 
If Death ends All, then the Mass of Mankind must 
live, toil, suffer and die under a Condition of Hope- 
less Injustice. 

WE must admit, however, that 
justice is incomplete, in the life 
of the individual in this world 
alone- — in that phase of existence which 
is bounded by birth as a beginning and by- 
death as an end — if it be really true that 
death ends all, that the processes of com- 
pensation are interrupted by death. All 
men are endowed at birth with unequal 
strength, intelligence and moral qualities. 
One, born of superior antecedents, is 
reared under benign influences, develops 
into noble manhood, lives under favorable 
environments to a good old age, and dies 
tranquilly. Another, a woman, born of 
[ 9* ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

low antecedents, is sold by a degraded 
mother into prostitution, lives a short and 
wretched life, and dies miserably. One, 
inheriting a mean intellect, lives on a 
level a little above the brute ; another, 
the idiot, is more helpless than the brute. 
To one pair are born fine children, who 
grow up to helpful maturity; to another 
pair comes a drunkard, a degenerate, an 
imbecile or a criminal. One, who con- 
forms to the opinions or institutions of his 
time, perhaps ignorantly or dishonestly, 
lives peacefully to old age ; another, more 
intelligent or sincere, suffers martyrdom 
for his devotion to right and duty. 

A few live long and pleasant lives, into 
which enters no unusual trouble, pain or 
misfortune. The lives of the many are 
short and broken, or rendered burdensome 
by slavish toil ; " by griefs that gnaw deep, 
by woes that are hard to bear." Story 
pictures these, in his " Io Victis," as — 

[ 93 ] 



BALANCE 



. . . " the low and the humble, the weary and broken 

in heart, 
Who strove and who failed, acting bravely a silent 

and desperate part ; 
Whose youth bore no flower on its branches, whose 

hopes burned in ashes away, 
From whose hands slipped the prize they had grasped 

at, who stood at the dying of day, 
With the work of their life all around them, unpitied, 

unheeded, alone, 
With death swooping down o'er their failure, and all 

but their faith overthrown." 

Nor are the good always happy, nor the 
vicious wretched, in proportion to their de- 
serts in this life. To the contrary, the good 
are often wretched and the vicious happy. 

The life here is as an intermediate act in 
a play or chapter in a novel, in which the 
plot has neither opening nor conclusion, 
and in which the action, separated from the 
preceding and succeeding parts, is appar- 
ently without purpose, sense or justice — 
in which wrong and villainy may be tri- 
umphant and integrity and virtue trampled 
in the dust. 

[ 94 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

Perhaps our passion for fiction and the 
drama is due to the fact that in them we 
find that completeness and justice which we 
rarely see in real life. In them the good, 
after many difficulties and troubles, are tri- 
umphant, and the evil are finally undone. 

Our fondness for biography and history 
— which abound also in rewards, retribu- 
tions and other equities — can be explained 
on similar grounds. We discover that com- 
pleteness and justice come to the individ- 
ual slowly, but surely, in a historic sense; 
that those made great by accident are in 
time forgotten; that the tyrannical and the 
cruel are detested; that Columbus left a 
better legacy than Caesar; that Newton is 
more honored than any English king; that 
Burns, the rustic poet, is better loved than 
Bonaparte, the conqueror. And we ob- 
serve that Lincoln — whose youth was for- 
lorn, whose life was full of care, who was 
murdered in the hour of his triumph — 
still lives in the hearts of his countrymen. 
[ 95 ] 



BALANCE 



And we learn to believe that the books 
of Nature must balance; that Time glori- 
fies the just, humiliates the arrogant, levels 
all inequalities, revenges all outrages, rights 
all wrongs. 

Thus we find in both fact and fiction, 
and in the hunger for justice in our own 
hearts, some warrant for our old faith that 
the present life is only a broken part of a 
much broader life which will be complete, 
and in which all things will be made right 
and even. 

If this life were broken into still shorter 
fragments, it would appear to be still more 
unjust. If, for illustration, each life con- 
sisted of one day only, then the lives of 
some would fall upon fair, mild or bril- 
liant days, and others upon wet, cold or 
hot days; some upon the long days of 
June, and others upon the short days of 
December; and some upon days into which 
no sunlight would enter, and these would 
doubt even the existence of the sun. 
[ 96 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

But our life here consists of many days, 
and we know that the good days outnum- 
ber the bad ones ; that the seasons return 
with precision, and that there are but slight 
variations in the annual rainfall and tem- 
perature of any given district. 

A week or even a month of bad days 
does not discourage us, for we know that 
in the round of a year we shall have about 
so much of rain and drought, sunshine and 
fog, heat and cold. So far as the weather 
is concerned, Nature's average restores 
approximate equilibrium in the cycle of 
a year, and complete balance in a term of 
years. 

The broader the basis of reckoning, the 
more perfect is the equivalence established 
by statistics and experience. While we 
have in our present life manifestations of 
balance in the alternations of the weather, 
in the recurrence of the seasons and in 
many other phenomena, and while a tend- 
ency toward justice is evident in all hu- 
[ 97 ] 



BALANCE 



man affairs, it is clear that the life here is 
neither long enough nor broad enough to 
establish complete compensation. 

A full consideration of the subject leads 
to the conclusion that, if death ends all, 
then the mass of mankind must live, toil, 
suffer and die under a condition of hope- 
less injustice — and hence that the only 
basis for the belief that justice will be 
completely established in human affairs is 
in the doctrine of the immortality of the 
soul. 

This conclusion sheds much light upon 
the universality, persistence and rational 
meaning of religion. 



[ 98 ] 



XIII 

The Essential Meaning of Religion is found in the 
Agreements, and not in the Disagreements, among 
Believers — There are Three Fundamental Reli- 
gious Beliefs : (i) That the Soul is Accountable 
for its Actions ; (2) That the Soul survives the 
Death of the Body; (3) In a Supreme Power that 
rights Things. 

RELIGION is the oldest, the most 
universal and the most permanent 
of the institutions of men. We 
have no historic record of a people who 
were destitute of every form and manifes- 
tation of religion. It is nurtured by civili- 
zation; it existed among the earlier and 
lower men. 

Tylor ranks perhaps as the foremost in- 
vestigator of primitive beliefs. In consid- 
ering the theory that there must be tribes 
so low as to be destitute of religious faith, 
he says: 

[ 99 ] 

LofC. 



BALANCE 



" Though the theoretical niche is ready and con- 
venient, the actual statue to fill it is not forthcoming. 
The case is in some degree similar to that of the 
tribes asserted to exist without language or without 
the use of fire ; nothing in the nature of things seems 
to forbid the possibility of such existence, but as a 
matter of fact the tribes are not found. Thus the 
assertion that rude non-religious tribes have been 
known in actual existence, though in theory possible, 
and perhaps in fact true, does not at present rest on 
that sufficient proof which, for an exceptional state 
of things, we are entitled to demand." — Primitive 
Culture, i. 418. 

Concerning the harmonies in religious 
beliefs, Tylor also says: 

"No religion of mankind lies in utter isolation 
from the rest, and the thoughts and principles of 
modern Christianity are attached to intellectual clues 
which run back through far pre-Christian ages to the 
very origin of human civilization, perhaps even of 
human existence.'' — Primitive Culture, i. 421. 

Spencer says: 

" Of religion, then, we must always remember that 
amid its many errors and corruptions it has asserted 
and diffused a supreme verity. From the first, the 

[ IO ° ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

recognition of this supreme verity, in however imper- 
fect a manner, has been its vital element; and its 
various defects, once extreme but gradually dimin- 
ishing, have been so many failures to recognize in 
full that which it recognized in part. The truly reli- 
gious element of religion has always been good ; that 
which has proved untenable in doctrine and vicious 
in practice has been its irreligious element ; and from 
this it has ever been undergoing purification." — First 
Principles, p. 104. 

Religion is a word which has not been 
clearly defined. It has one meaning to 
Jews, another to Christians, another to 
Mohammedans, another to Buddhists. 
Even the Christians — being divided into 
many sects — hold views more or less in 
conflict concerning the meaning of reli- 
gion. The lexicographers have defined the 
word timidly and haltingly, drawing no 
clear distinction between religion and 
theology. 

What is the actual meaning of the great 
fact which we call religion ? Where shall 
we find the " supreme verity " to which 
[ 101 ] 



BALANCE 



Mr. Spencer refers, and the harmony of 
which Mr. Tylor speaks ? 

It would be useless to attempt to dis- 
cover a ground of agreement in all of 
the thought of the world concerning reli- 
gion, for the thinking on the subject has 
been voluminous and endless, good and 
bad, sane and insane. Nor should we ex- 
pect to find an essential harmony in all 
religious organizations, great and small, 
temporary and permanent, powerful and 
insignificant. It is conceivable that a sect 
claiming to be religious is really irre- 
ligious. 

We should seek for the essential meaning 
of religion in the broad principle or prin- 
ciples which have been accepted by great 
masses of men in places and times wide 
apart; in the permanent manifestations of 
religious sentiment, and in the instinctive, 
spontaneous and untaught beliefs common 
to primitive men which survive in more 
highly developed form among the enlight- 
[ I02 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

ened. And we must seek for it finally in 
the harmony of belief in the great religious 
organizations now in existence; for they 
must contain, in the natural order of 
growth, that which is worthy of survival 
in the religious faith that has preceded 
them. We must seek for the meaning of 
religion in the agreements, and not in the 
disagreements, among believers. 

It is now conceded by enlightened the- 
ologians, as well as by philosophers, that 
religious institutions and beliefs have de- 
veloped through the universal principle of 
evolution. And it follows that, as the oak 
is something more complete than the 
acorn, astronomy than astrology, man than 
the ape, so we shall find religious beliefs 
to be more perfectly developed in enlight- 
enment than in savagery. 

"For a principle of development," says 

Edward Caird (Evolution of Religion, 

pp. 43-45), "necessarily manifests itself 

most clearly in the most mature form of 

[ I0 3 ] 



BALANCE 



that which develops. ... It is the devel- 
oped organism that explains the germ 
from which it grew. . . . We must find 
the key to the meaning of the first stage 
in the last." 

i. The Belief that the Soul is Account- 
able/or its Actions. 

" I entertain a good hope/' says Socrates, 
" that something awaits those who die, and 
that, as was said long since, it will be far 
better for the good than the evil." 

A very old belief — which grows with 
man's growth and strengthens with his 
enlightenment — is the faith that he is ac- 
countable for his actions. 

Tylor, who doubts that the doctrine of 
compensation was universal among primi- 
tive races, admits that it existed among 
many, and that it extended and developed 
with the growth of mankind. He says: 

" A comparison of doctrines held at various stages 
of culture may justify a tentative speculation as to 
[ I0 4 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

their actual sequence in history, favoring the opinion 
that through an intermediate stage the doctrine of 
simple future existence was actually developed into 
the doctrine of future reward and punishment, a 
transition which, for deep import to human life, has 
scarcely its rival in the history of religion." — Primi- 
tive Culture, ii. 84. 

, D'Alviella says: 

" The idea of a judgment of the dead, to which the 
theory of rewards and punishments naturally leads as 
its culmination, appears to have found its way into 
the minds even of very backward peoples." — Hib- 
bert Lectures, p. 193. 

Tangible evidence of the belief in ac- 
countability by primitive tribes now extinct 
being lacking, many scientific investigators 
deny that it existed. 

Yet these investigators agree that pro- 
pitiation was an universal rite among the 
lowest men, that it survived the increase 
of culture, and has existed to the present 
time. Why did primitive men propitiate 
the spirits of their dead? And why did 
[ 105 ] 



BALANCE 



the later cults propitiate fetiches, idols and 
gods ? 

Propitiation is offered through fear to 
powers to which one acknowledges ac- 
countability. The culprit propitiates his 
judge, the slave his master, the subject 
his ruler. It is evident that the motive 
strong enough and general enough to im- 
pel the primitive tribes to propitiate the 
spirits of the dead must have been based 
on the belief that man was accountable 
to the spirits, whom he credited with ex- 
traordinary powers. 

It appears to me that the sense of ac- 
countability was in the nature of things 
the first religious sentiment in the mind of 
man; that it preceded the belief in a future 
life and in superhuman powers; that it 
was based and still rests upon cause and 
effect, which are apparent to the dull, as 
well as to the enlightened; that the lower 
men perceived that the fruits of certain 
acts and things were good and of others 
[ 106 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

bad, and that this perception led inevita- 
bly, in the infancy of thought, to the recog- 
nition of the law of consequences, which 
is the law of accountability, of rewards 
and penalties. 

The knowledge of primitive man begins 
with cause and effect. He discovers that 
water quenches thirst, game is found under 
certain conditions, a cave gives shelter, 
friction brings fire, the sun yields heat 
and light, some plants are poisonous, frost 
withers, lightning kills. 

The first lesson learned by the infant 
is connected with cause and effect. The 
mother is the source of food, the cause of 
protection. Later the child learns that 
through effort it can walk; that some 
things are hurtful and others helpful; 
some bitter, some sweet; some heavy, 
some light. It discovers that some actions 
are beneficial and may be safely repeated; 
that others are injurious and should be 
avoided. The beneficial it recognizes as 
[ l °7 ] 



BALANCE 



good, the harmful as evil. That which 
hurts, even if inanimate, the child would 
punish; that which is pleasant it rewards 
at least with a smile. The baby becomes 
a judge, and gives forth verdicts. Before 
it can speak its first word, it knows much 
instinctively of cause and effect, of good 
and evil, recognizes the utility of rewards 
and penalties, and comprehends dimly the 
law of compensation. 

The brute also, in proportion to its in- 
telligence, understands cause and effect; 
it recognizes its enemies, comprehends its 
own weakness and strength, declines con- 
flict save on terms favorable to itself, and 
knows the distinction in numerous cases 
between things harmful and things bene- 
ficial. The wisest man is distinguished in- 
tellectually from the lower men, and from 
the brutes, by his superior knowledge of 
cause and effect and of the distinctions be- 
tween good and evil. 

Man's belief in his accountability — that 
[ 108 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

is, in cause and effect — is fundamental. It 
begins with his first rational consideration 
of his relations to the external world and 
to the order of Nature, which he will later 
deify. Nature has two imperative com- 
mands which primitive man hears con- 
stantly — " Thou shalt" and "Thou shalt 
not." As his mind grows, the horizon of 
his accountability extends until it passes 
beyond the confines of this life. Believing 
in his own survival of death, he anticipates 
that in the after-life it will be " far better 
for the good than the evil." 

It would be a reasonable assumption 
that the theories of a superhuman power 
or powers, of potent spirits, fetiches, idols, 
of many gods, and finally of one God, grew 
out of man's feeling of accountability. His 
sense of accountability forced him to be- 
lieve that he was responsible to some 
power which sets things right. Man has 
been so impressed usually by his accounta- 
bility for his sins — by " the dread of some- 
[ I0 9 ] 



BALANCE 



thing after death " — that he has sought 
means of escape from it as he would from 
wild beasts, from flood or from fire. 

D'Alviella (Hibbert Lectures, p. 179) 
says that religion from the first " de- 
veloped a spirit of subordination" and 
" favored the sacrifice of a direct and im- 
mediate satisfaction to a greater but more 
distant and indirect good." 

The theory of "a standard of duty pre- 
scribed by something loftier than imme- 
diate advantage," as Brinton expresses it, 
which was recognized dimly and roughly 
by the lower tribes, has been accepted by 
all later forms of faith. 

We find the doctrine that the soul is 
accountable for its actions bedded in 
the foundations of religion, entering com- 
pletely into the life here and into the life 
hereafter. It lies at the base of all religious 
theories of reward and retribution, of a 
day of judgment, of salvation and dam- 
nation, of heaven and hell. 

e "° ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

2. The Belief that the Soul survives the 
Death of the Body. 

Tylor claims (Primitive Culture, i. 424) 
" as a minimum definition of religion, the 
belief in spiritual beings" which ap- 
pears (p. 425) "among all low races with 
whom we have attained to thoroughly in- 
timate relations." He defines " the belief 
in spiritual beings " (p. 427) as including 
in its full development " the belief in souls 
and in a future state" 

This belief, he says (p. 426), is " the 
groundwork of the philosophy of reli- 
gion, from that of savages up to that of 
civilized man;" and constitutes (p. 427) 
" an ancient and world-wide philosophy." 

Grant Allen says: 

"Religion, however, has one element within it still 
older, more fundamental, and more persistent than 
any mere belief in a God or gods — nay, even than 
the custom of supplicating and appeasing ghosts or 
gods by gifts and observances. That element is the 
conception of the life of the dead. On the primitive 



BALANCE 



belief in such a life all religion ultimately bases itself. 
The belief is in fact the earliest thing to appear in 
religion, for there are savage tribes who have nothing 
worth calling gods, but have still a religion or cult 
of their dead relatives." — The Evolution of the Idea 
of God, p. 42. 

Brinton says: 

"I shall tell you of religions" so crude as to have 
no temples or altars, no rites or prayers ; but I can 
tell you of none that does not teach the belief of the 
intercommunion of the spiritual powers and man." 

— Religions of Primitive Peoples, p. 50. 

D'Alviella says: 

" The discoveries of the last five-and-twenty years, 
especially in the caves of France and Belgium, have 
established conclusively that as early as the mam- 
moth age man practiced funeral rites, believed in a 
future life, and possessed fetiches and perhaps even 
idols." — Hibbert Lectures, p. 15. 

Huxley says: 

" There are savages without God in any proper 
sense of the word, but there are none without ghosts." 

— Lay Sermons and Addresses, p. 163. 

Spencer says that the conception of the 
soul's survival of physical death, 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

" along with the multiplying and complicating ideas 
arising from it, we find everywhere — alike in the 
arctic regions and the tropics ; in the forests of North 
America and in the deserts of Arabia; in the val- 
leys of the Himalayas and in African jungles ; on the 
flanks of the Andes and in the Polynesian islands. 
It is exhibited with equal clearness by races so re- 
mote in type from one another that competent judges 
think they must have diverged before the existing 
distribution of land and sea was established — among 
straight haired, curly haired, woolly haired races; 
among white, tawny, copper colored, black. And we 
find it among peoples who have made no advances 
in civilization as well as among the semi-civilized 
and the civilized." — Sociology, ii. 689. 

Some recognition of the doctrine of a 
future life is found in the religious cults, 
ancient and modern, of which we have ac- 
curate knowledge. Even the ancient He- 
brews, whose faith was more materialistic 
doubtless than any other that is known to 
us, believed in spirits within and without 
men, that Elijah " went up by a whirlwind 
into heaven," that the dead Samuel ap- 
peared to Saul, that " the Lord killeth and 
[ "3 ] 



BALANCE 



maketh alive: he bringeth down to the 
grave, and bringeth up," and that all souls 
went at death to a vague and shadowy 
hereafter which could not be called life, 
and yet was not complete annihilation. The 
modern Hebrews repudiate the material- 
ism of early Judaism. For more than six 
hundred years the Jewish church has ac- 
cepted the doctrine of "the resurrection 
of the dead " in the creed of Maimonides. 

In the same way the Chinese have re- 
pudiated Confucius. While the thought of 
Confucius is materialistic, the Chinese re- 
ligions are profoundly spiritualistic. Not 
even Confucius, the adored and venerated 
philosopher of the Chinese, nor the writers 
of the Old Testament, could wean their 
followers permanently from the instinctive 
belief in a future life. 

Instinctive religion — that which is 

permanent and untaught as distinguished 

from that which is temporary, isolated, or 

based on speculation or authority — toler- 

[ "4 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

ates no limitation upon the after-life of 
man. Here and there some teacher or 
prophet has proclaimed that only women, 
or the married, or the great or the good, 
or even that no one, will survive death, 
but such theories have left no permanent 
impression upon the religious convic- 
tions of mankind. The modern religious 
organizations of substance and permanence 
hold that all mankind will survive death. 
We may conclude, in the light of all the 
facts obtainable, that the belief in a future 
life — that the soul survives the death of 
the body — is a fundamental precept of 
religion. 

3. The Belief in a Supreme Power that 
rights Things. 

The belief in superhuman influences and 
powers has been and continues to be uni- 
versal, accepted alike by the lowest savage 
and the highest philosopher; by the deist, 
pantheist and atheist, as well as by the the- 
[ "5 ] 



BALANCE 



ist. Primitive man had a low or dull con- 
ception of the overruling power. Some- 
times he located it in a pebble or great 
rock; in a hill or mountain; in the dawn, 
sun, moon or stars ; in a mummy or idol; 
in his own ancestor; even in animals, fishes 
or reptiles. In whatever form he recog- 
nized it, however, it was to him a power 
that rights things, a beneficence to which 
he offered sacrifices and implorations. 

The primitive interpretations of the su- 
preme energy improved with man's growth 
in culture. The lower conceptions gave 
way to something better, and these to some- 
thing still better — f etichism to idolatry, 
idolatry to polytheism, polytheism to mon- 
otheism. 

It is sometimes said that Buddhism is 
a godless religion, and this assertion has 
been used as a foundation for the assump- 
tion that a belief in God is not fundamen- 
tal in religion. It may be that Buddhism 
recognizes no supreme being, but it is 
[ "6 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

not true that Buddhism recognizes no 
power or powers that right things. No 
religion recognizes more completely than 
Buddhism the eternal forces of reward and 
retribution, as is illustrated in Karma, the 
law of just consequences. 

Religion deals fundamentally with the 
higher duties and obligations of man- 
kind. It has assumed naturally, indeed 
necessarily, that man is subject to some 
order or ruler possessed of unlimited 
power. While the lower cults have recog- 
nized in the fetich or idol a force which 
is helpful of or considerate to mankind, 
the more elevated races and sects have 
attributed more sublime qualities to the 
supreme force. A divine power is recog- 
nized in Varuna, the chief deity of the 
early Aryans; in Brahma, the absolute 
of the Hindoos; in Jehovah, the almighty 
of the Hebrews and Christians; in Odin, 
the all-father of the Norsemen; in Zeus, 
the highest deity of the Greeks; in Jupiter, 
[ "7 ] 



BALANCE 



the chief God of the Romans; in Allah, 
the one God of the Mohammedans. The 
strongest words expressive of beneficence 
and omnipotence are applied habitually to 
God — the providence, the divine, the in- 
finite, the eternal, the all-powerful, the all- 
present, the all-holy, the immutable, the 
most high, the ruler of heaven and earth, 
the king of kings, the light of the world, 
the sun of righteousness. We may safely 
claim that the belief in a supreme ^poiver 
that rights things is fundamental in re- 
ligion. 



C "8 ] 



XIV 

The Fundamental Meaning of Religion is revealed 
by its History — Religion recognizes that Right 
rules the World — Science recognizes that Balance 
rules the World — Religion and Science are in 
Harmony, not in Conflict. 

WE have, then, three fundamental 
religious beliefs: 

i. That the soul is account- 
able/or its actions. 

2. That the soul survives the death of 
the body. 

3. In a supreme power that rights 
things. 

The belief that the soul is accountable 
for its actions, is the recognition that the 
law of consequences applies to the indi- 
vidual soul, that the good shall fare better 
than the evil, that men shall reap as they 
sow. 

The belief that the soul survives the 
[ "9 ] 



BALANCE 



death of the body, is the recognition that 
accountability does not end with the death 
of the body; that the wrongs which are not 
righted here must be righted elsewhere; 
that the good which is not rewarded here 
must be rewarded hereafter; that there can 
be no break in the processes of account- 
ability. As science assumes that cause and 
effect, action and reaction, motion and 
transformation, are ceaseless in the phys- 
ical world, so religion assumes that cause 
and effect, actions and consequences, are 
ceaseless in the soul of the individual. 
The religious doctrine of ceaseless moral 
accountability is identical with the scien- 
tific doctrine of ceaseless cause and effect. 
The belief in a supreme power that 
rights things, is the necessary corollary of 
the two preceding beliefs. The doctrines 
that the actions of the individual will be 
balanced by their consequences, and that 
this process does not cease with death, 
include the recognition of a supreme 
[ I2 ° ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

power of Tightness — a -power that rights 
things. 

Combined, read from one into the other, 
what is the message conveyed by these 
three fundamental religious beliefs ? Are 
they in harmony or in conflict? is the 
message discordant, or feeble, or subtle, 
or unworthy of the great fact which we 
call religion ? or is it harmonious, simple 
and clear, a noble interpretation of divine 
truth ? This is the message of the funda- 
mental religious beliefs: That man is 
accountable for his actions j that he is sub- 
ject ceaselessly to the law of just conse- 
quences, to a supreme power of rightness. 
The message is so clear and simple that 
it may even be more briefly expressed 
as the declaration that right rules the 
world. 

This interpretation of the meaning of 

religion is not the interpretation of one 

sect or church, of one time or place; it is 

the interpretation of all sects and churches 

[ «i ] 



BALANCE 



that can be classed as religious, and of all 
times and places in which religion has 
been manifest. It is not the product of 
speculation or inspiration; it is the product 
of all human experience bearing upon the 
subject of religion. The meaning of re- 
ligion, the message of religion, is found in 
its own history. Religion contains within 
itself its own story, as the rocks contain 
within themselves their own story. The 
message of religion is not vague, difficult 
or unworthy; it is plain, easy to compre- 
hend; it is lofty and good. Mankind's 
recognition of religion as something holy, 
sacred and divine is fully justified by the 
interpretation of religion revealed by the 
history of religion — that right rules the 
world. 

We have observed the harmony in the 
scientific interpretations of the system of 
Nature — that each interpretation points 
unerringly to a higher and single interpre- 
tation. And we now observe the same 
[ I22 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

harmony in the fundamental conceptions 
of religion, which point with equal certi- 
tude to a conclusion in unity with the su- 
preme interpretation reached by science. 

Religion, dealing with the essential obli- 
gations and relations of man, rests with 
the recognition of eternal justice — that 
right rules the world. Science, dealing 
with all truth, with the explanation and 
reconciliation of all phenomena, advances 
to a still broader position — that balance 
rules the -world — a position so broad that 
it includes the fundamental grounds of re- 
ligion. 

Religion and science are in harmony, 
not in conflict. They have never been in 
real conflict. The appearance of conflict 
has been due to the misunderstanding and 
misinterpretation of both religion and sci- 
ence through the ages in which men have 
been groping and toiling upward from 
darkness to light. 

[ "3 ] 



XV 

Religion has been misinterpreted and perverted — 
Science also has been misinterpreted and per- 
verted — Religion answers for its Perversions as 
Science, Truth and Right answer for their Per- 
versions — The Value of a Truth is measured by 
the Magnitude of its Perversions. 

SCIENCE is a search for truth; it 
measures all things by truth, has no 
other standard than truth. As truth 
never conflicts with truth, the demonstra- 
tions of science are necessarily harmoni- 
ous, the same original demonstration often 
being reached by strangers wide apart. 
Science consists of a stupendous unity 
linking the smallest and most obscure 
truths with higher truths, and these with 
still higher truths, on to their connection 
with fundamental truth. The achieve- 
ments of science are due to the methods 
of science — to experimentation, investi- 
[ »4 1 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

gation, critical examination — to the pa- 
tient weighing of facts by the standard of 
truth. 

Religious thought has evolved necessa- 
rily on other lines. The problems of re- 
ligion — the war between good and evil, 
the mystery of life and death, the nature 
of superhuman powers, of the government 
of the world, of the future state, of man's 
accountability — have appealed with con- 
tinuous force to the interest and imagina- 
tion of men. The yearning to know was 
gratified in the beginning by savage dream- 
ers and mystics, who assumed to be, or 
believed themselves to be, inspired to utter 
divine truth. Religion has been inter- 
preted by sorcerers and by sages, by im- 
postors and by truth-seekers, by dull and 
by exalted minds. Some of the interpreta- 
tions are childish or base ; others supply to 
us our highest conceptions of honor, duty 
and responsibility. Great systems of faith 
grew up, each claiming to be built upon 
[ i*5 ] 



BALANCE 



sacred and infallible authority. The re- 
ligious spirit is reverential and steadfast; 
men have yielded slowly the faith of their 
fathers. The Hebrews accept one author- 
ity, the Buddhists another, the Christians 
another, the Mohammedans another, and 
other authorities are accepted by other 
believers. Men have measured religious 
truth by authority, not authority by truth. 
Each of the great systems of faith assumes 
the perfect truth of its own authority, and 
denies the truth of all authority except its 
own, thereby admitting the existence of 
false authorities, false prophets and the 
worship of false gods. 

Admitting many contradictions and im- 
perfections in the interpretation of religion, 
shall we conclude that there is no truth in 
religion? Grant numberless errors and 
impostures, must we say that all religion 
is error and imposture ? Let us be as fair 
to religion as to science. Have no errors 
or impostures been advanced in the name 
[ "6 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

of science? Consider only that branch of 
science which deals with healing. Have 
there been no false doctors in the world? 
no errors in determining the cause and 
cure of disease? no medical zealots, in- 
flamed with a fanatical regard for their 
own methods, and with enmity for other 
methods ? no conflicting schools of medi- 
cal thought? Because of the errors, im- 
postures and strife known to exist among 
those engaged in the art of healing, do 
people of intelligence conclude that the 
science of medicine consists wholly of er- 
ror, delusion and imposture? that it has 
discovered no antidotes, no laws of health, 
no causes of disease ? that sanitation and 
surgery have no merit? 

The record of the science of healing 
contains superstitions as dull and rites as 
base as the lowest religious cults; indeed, 
the false medicine man and the false pro- 
phet have often been one and the same. 
Men have sought the healer of the body 
[ I2 7 ] 



BALANCE 



because of their fear of the consequences 
of physical disease; they have sought the 
healer of the soul because of their dread 
of the consequences of moral disease. The 
healers, physical and spiritual, have dealt 
sometimes in nostrums, exorcisms, con- 
jurations and sorceries; and again in bet- 
ter remedies which, on the one hand, have 
alleviated pain, cured disease and saved 
life, and, on the other hand, have strength- 
ened men in right-doing, purified them, 
given them noble ideals of life and duty, 
and comforted them in trouble, sorrow, 
bereavement, agony, and in the face of 
death. 

Let us not underweigh the fact that 
men have believed in their souls, in life 
after death, in responsibility that does not 
end, in an unbroken chain of cause and 
effect, in eternal justice — that they have 
spanned the abyss of death with a bridge 
of faith leading to a land where the ine- 
qualities, misunderstandings and wrongs of 
[ 128 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

this life may be righted. Intuition, instinct, 
or some other form of insight, sometimes 
anticipates science. The supreme law of 
compensation, which the early mystics 
recognized through that happy insight by 
which men grasp truth which they cannot 
yet demonstrate, science recognizes also 
after thousands of years of investigation 
and experimentation. 

Let us not be impatient. Civilization 
was not made in a day. Our sciences have 
been built slowly; they are not yet com- 
pleted, and we must assume that they never 
will be completed, unless it be possible 
that a time will come when truth will be 
exhausted. The search for truth has been 
slow and difficult, and many are the errors 
into which men have fallen. " The laws of 
Plato," says Lecky, " of the twelve tables, 
of the consuls, of the emperors, and of all 
nations and legislators — Persian, Hebrew, 
Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian, 
Spanish, English — decreed capital penal- 
[ I2 9 3 



BALANCE 



ties against sorcerers." When Montaigne 
denounced the belief in witchcraft as a de- 
lusion, its existence was accepted by the 
foremost magistrates, physicians and scien- 
tific men of France. Bacon regarded the 
Copernican theory as a strange fancy. 
Kepler, who discovered the laws of plane- 
tary motion, believed that a spirit guided 
the movements of each planet. The chem- 
ists of the eighteenth century up to the 
time of Lavoisier believed in the theory 
of " phlogiston," a curious error. Priest- 
ley, the discoverer of oxygen, died a firm 
believer in phlogiston. Guyton de Mor- 
veau, Macquer and others taught that 
phlogiston was something that weighed 
less than nothing! Political science has 
not yet discovered a way of governing an 
American city honestly and efficiently, nor 
has economic science reformed the in- 
equitable distribution of wealth. The phi- 
losophers of the world, from the beginning 
of philosophy to the present day, have 
[ 130 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

reached no agreement concerning the 
motives of human actions or the meaning 
of morals. 

Science has achieved much, but it is not 
at the end, or near the end, of achievement. 
It has struggled up from small beginnings; 
scientific men, wise men in their day, have 
accepted error. Science is not responsible 
for their errors; science has nothing to do 
with error but to reject it. And so reli- 
gious men have accepted error, and reli- 
gion is not responsible for their mistakes. 
It seems sometimes as if men must try all 
wrong ways, in every line of advancement, 
before they can find the right way. 

The interpretations of religion have dealt 
with the questions: How does right rule 
the world? How will justice be done to 
the individual soul? It is not strange that 
there have been numerous and conflicting 
answers to these questions; and that many 
of these answers are crude and ignorant, 
and some even monstrous and forbidding. 
[ «3i ] 



BALANCE 



The primitive mystics, recognizing dimly 
the law of consequences, clothed it in sym- 
bols adapted to their own comprehension 
and to the comprehension of their kind — 
in fetiches and idols, in strange gods, in 
numberless forms of penance and propitia- 
tion, in curious judgments, rewards and 
penalties, in heavens and hells which were 
circumscribed only by the limits of their 
imaginations. This may be said to their 
credit: they recognized rewards and pen- 
alties, recompense and retribution, heaven 
and hell. Their lowest conceptions of a 
future state included some recognition of 
moral responsibility and of the supremacy 
of justice. I do not despise their efforts. 
They expressed man's greatest hope — that 
right rules the world — in terms which 
they could understand. They could do no 
more. If that hope — I would prefer to say 
that truth — had waited for its complete 
and perfect exposition, it would doubtless 
be unexpressed to this day. 
[ J 32 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

The earlier symbols gave way to better 
symbols, and these to still better; in time, 
doubtless, all religious symbols will give 
way to the truth which they symbolize. En- 
lightenment grows; superstition dwindles. 
Thought grows clearer. Many creeds have 
been revised. The doctrines of a hell of 
literal fire, and of eternal torment, have 
been abandoned by enlightened people. 
This advance must continue until the 
churches of civilization shall abandon the 
last form, rite, ceremony and doctrine which 
stand in conflict with the fundamental reli- 
gious principle that right rules the world. 
They must in time accept the book of Na- 
ture as the book of God, and recognize that 
the truth-finders are God's prophets — that 
truth, wherever and whenever discovered, 
is the infallible revelation of God — that 
religious truth can be demonstrated only 
by reason, and that God's justice must be 
proved by the processes of Nature if it 
is to be proved at all — that God's jus- 
[ *33 ] 



BALANCE 



tice, omnipotence and omnipresence can 
be proved more perfectly by the fact 
that cause and effect are equivalent, com- 
pensatory, ceaseless, all-powerful and all- 
present, than by any sacred book — that 
science, in its fundamental interpretation 
of the system of Nature, in its sublime 
conception of the permanence, uniformity 
and rectitude of the world-order, must be 
accepted as the defender, and not as the 
antagonist, of religion. There is no con- 
flict in the revelations of Nature. In all 
times and places, Nature's laws have been 
the same, and truth the same. Never has 
Nature altered or truth changed. 

Religion has been misinterpreted ; it 
has also been perverted. While there are 
no cults known to us which do not recog- 
nize the law of consequences, there are 
many which teach that it can be evaded 
— that the favor of God can be gained 
by means other than by right-doing. 
And, in the name of religion, learning 
[ '34 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

has been persecuted, freedom suppressed, 
great and cruel wars have been waged, 
and monstrous crimes committed — in- 
cluding torture and many forms of mur- 
der, from the slaughter of children on the 
sacrificial altar to the butchery of sects 
and communities. How shall religion 
answer for these evasions, iniquities and 
atrocities ? 

Wrong seeks to disguise itself under 
the cloak of right; tyrants claim to be 
good, not bad; privilege, slavery, the sup- 
pression of thought, are represented by 
their beneficiaries to be right, not wrong 
— to be good even for the unprivileged, 
the enslaved and the shackled. Error dis- 
guises itself as truth. The liar does not 
say, " I am telling you a lie; " he says, " I 
am telling you the truth." The misinter- 
preters of history, biography, philosophy 
and science do not label their misinter- 
pretations as errors; they proclaim them 
as truths. 

C '35 ] 



BALANCE 



Religion must answer for its perver- 
sions as right answers for the perversions 
of right, as truth answers for the perver- 
sions of truth, as science answers for the 
perversions of science. Right answers 
that its perversions are wrong, not right; 
truth answers that its perversions are er- 
rors, not truth; science answers that its 
perversions are unscientific, not scientific; 
religion answers that its perversions are 
irreligious, not religious. 

Only good and truth can be perverted. 
The value and quality of a good or truth 
— the usefulness of the art of healing, the 
nobility of toleration and justice, the value 
of science — are measured with accuracy 
by the wide extent of its perversions. And 
so also the usefulness, nobility and value 
of religion are indicated by the magnitude 
of its perversions. I believe that the per- 
versions of religion — unequaled as they 
are in magnitude by any other record of 
perversion — point unerringly to the con- 

c 136 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

elusion that religion rests fundamentally 
upon a great and noble truth. 

Religion is single, not plural. There is 
only one religion. The creeds written, the 
acts done, in the name of religion are re- 
ligious in so far as they conform to the 
fundamental religious principle that right 
rules the world; they are irreligious in so 
far as they are in conflict with that prin- 
ciple. 



[ '37 ] 



XVI 

Measuring the Value of Religion by its Denial — 
Only One School of Thought denies Religion — 
Materialism is the Doctrine that Wrong rules the 
World — Science and Religion meet on Grounds 
of Life, not Death; of Persistence, not Annihila- 
tion ; of Right, not Wrong ; on the Ground that the 
Laws of Nature are Uniform, not Contradictory. 

WE can measure the strength or 
weakness of religion by the 
strength or weakness of its op- 
posite, its denial. If religion be strong, its 
denial will be weak; if religion be weak, 
its denial will be strong. 

The denial that right rules the world is 
the affirmation that wrong rules the world. 
The assumption that wrong rules the world 
has no foundation in the demonstrations of 
science — which point unerringly to the 
return of equivalence and compensation in 
the processes of Nature — and has had 
[ 138 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

slight recognition in human thought. It is 
true that men have held beliefs which lead 
logically to the conclusion that wrong 
rules the world, but there have been few 
who could accept that conclusion. No 
school of thought proclaims it, and it rarely 
secures lodgment in the human mind save 
as the consequence of pessimism or mis- 
fortune. We must conclude that the denial 
of religion which takes form in the asser- 
tion that wrong rules the world is weak, 
not strong. 

The existence of a supreme power — 
whether it be accepted as personal or as 
impersonal, as knowable or as unknowable 
— is universally recognized. It is usually 
assumed to be a power of rightness. It 
could not be called a power of wrongness 
without accepting the weak conclusion 
that wrong rules the world. 

The assumption that man is, or should 
be, accountable for his actions, is recog- 
nized in our civil and criminal laws, which 
[ *39 ] 



BALANCE 



enforce penalties upon wrong-doing, and 
compel men to keep their contracts and 
pay their debts; in our moral code, and in 
our judgments concerning right and wrong. 
The alternative, that men should not reap 
as they sow, should not enjoy what they 
earn, should not suffer for their evil acts, 
is recognized nowhere. A few believe 
that wrong does rule the world, but no 
one can believe that wrong should rule 
the world. 

Only one fundamental religious belief 
— the belief in a future life — is denied 
with force or persistence. Many men, in- 
cluding some of the great intellects of the 
world, from Confucius to Herbert Spencer, 
have doubted or denied that the soul sur- 
vives the death of the body. 

It is a curious fact that the doctrine of 
the annihilation of the soul has not yet ac- 
quired a definite name, though its adher- 
ents include a number of learned men, 
capable in the expression of thought and 
[ Ho ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

in the coining of words. " Materialism " 
is the word used, in the absence of a better, 
to name this doctrine, but the dictionaries 
do not justify that use. Haeckel, recog- 
nizing its namelessness, has recently in- 
vented the word " thanatism " — in English, 
" deathism " — a fit name for the belief in 
the extinction of the soul. I shall, how- 
ever, use the word " materialism," which 
is better known. 

What rational foundation exists for the 
belief in annihilation? Has science dis- 
covered annihilation? No; science has 
not discovered annihilation; it has not 
discovered annihilation even in the physi- 
cal body of man. At the change which, 
through old custom, we call death, the 
physical body of the individual is trans- 
formed under ordinary conditions into 
numberless other living bodies, the one 
life into swarms of life. Even if the physi- 
cal body be consumed by fire, not one 
atom is annihilated, and life springs from 
[ Hi ] 



BALANCE 



the ashes. Science is acquainted with mo- 
tion only, not rest ; with life, not death. 
Science recognizes the indestructibility 
of matter and force, that nothing in the 
physical world is annihilated. It comes to 
this — that the materialist, accepting the 
immortality of matter and force, must 
affirm that nothing dies but the soul. 

There are other and more serious incon- 
sistencies in the theory of annihilation. 
The ceaselessness of action and reaction, 
of cause and effect, is a fundamental postu- 
late of science. " To every action there 
is an equal and opposite reaction." If death 
ends all, then the individual reaches in 
extinction a point where moral effect fails 
to follow moral cause, and the materialist 
must deny the ceaselessness of cause and 
effect. 

One dies in the commission of a crime, 
when his heart is full of greed or lust or 
hate; if death ends all, he suffers no con- 
sequences of his sin; he goes to the same 
[ H* ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

silence which awaits the martyr who dies 
for man. If suicide be a sin, then the sui- 
cide commits an act, if death ends all, for 
which there is no penalty. The doctrine 
of extinction includes the assumption that 
there will be no reckoning hereafter for 
the tyrants, oppressors and scourgers of 
the weak, for the brutes who trample on 
women and children, for ingrates and 
murderers, for those who have tortured 
their kind — that man sows what he will 
not reap, and reaps what he has not sown. 
Religion affirms, on the other hand, that 
death does not break the chain of cause 
and effect; that men shall reap as they 
sow; that there shall come a day of reck- 
oning for the tyrant and the torturer; that 
the suicide shall not escape the conse- 
quences of self destruction; that no man 
shall escape the penalty of his sin, or be 
denied the reward of his virtue; that, for 
those who live justly, there is no trouble 
which will not end, no night of sorrow or 
[ H3 ] 



BALANCE 



anguish which will not be succeeded by 
the dawn of peace and joy. 

Religion declares that moral accounta- 
bility is ceaseless; materialism declares 
that moral accountability ends in death. 
Religion is the recognition that right rules 
the world; materialism is the recognition 
that wrong rules the world. Religion de- 
clares that the wrongs which are not 
righted here will be righted hereafter; 
materialism declares that the wrongs which 
are not righted here will be righted no- 
where. 

Materialism is a sweeping denial of 
good and right. In denying the ceaseless- 
ness of action and reaction, it denies the 
uniformity of Nature; in denying the per- 
sistence of the soul, it proclaims the doc- 
trine of annihilation, which is unknown 
to science; in denying the continuance 
of human accountability, it denies the 
foundation of morals. Materialism is the 
doctrine of eternal wrong, of hopeless in- 
[ *44 ] 



THE FUNDAMENTAL VERITY 

justice. Comprehending the nature and 
meaning of the theory of annihilation, 
we shall understand why it is nameless; 
why our language has failed to produce 
a word to fit its exact meaning; why its 
most famous living defender, Haeckel, 
has been unable to coin for it a better 
name than the somber and forbidding word 
" deathism." 

We shall search in vain for any good 
or substantial fruits of materialism — for 
hospitals, charities or institutions of learn- 
ing founded in its name or honor; for 
monuments which recognize it; for any 
part that it has played in the advancement 
of civilization; for uplifting songs, hymns, 
poems or speeches inspired by it; for a 
noble thought or sentiment that is depend- 
ent upon it; for sublime or heroic deeds 
in its defense. The doctrine of material- 
ism, built upon an imperfect understand- 
ing of its relations and consequences, is a 
cold, dry, unstimulating faith which has 
[ HS ] 



BALANCE 



never reached the human heart save with 
the icy touch of hopelessness and despair. 

The scientific interpretations of Nature 
have advanced constantly in breadth — 
into the uniform, the boundless, the uni- 
versal, the ceaseless, the deathless. Upon 
these broad grounds, religion and science 
meet — on the ground of life, not death; 
of persistence, not annihilation; of right, 
not wrong; on the ground of the uniform- 
ity of Nature: that the consequences of 
human action are as definite as the conse- 
quences of chemical action; that the laws 
of equivalence and compensation which 
operate in the realm of physics act with 
the same unfailing certainty, and with the 
same eternal ceaselessness, upon the soul 
of man. 



[ H6 ] 



APPENDIX 



APPENDIX 



REVIEWS OF "BALANCE" 

Desiring that the theory herein advanced 
should be tested by intelligent criticism, I 
authorized a New York literary syndicate 
to send a preliminary edition of this vol- 
ume, containing the foregoing matter, to a 
number of persons prominent in literary, 
scientific, philosophic or religious work> 
asking each for a brief review of " Bal- 
ance." The letter of the syndicate was as 
follows: 

" We are mailing to you to-day an advance copy of 
' Balance : The Fundamental Verity/ by Orlando 
J. Smith, in which the author seeks for the funda- 
mental harmony between physical science and natural 
religion. We should be glad to receive from you a 
review, not exceeding five hundred words, of this 
book, confined to any or all of these topics : 
[ H9 ] 



BALANCE 



" i. Is the author right or wrong in his conclusion 
that scientific experience and the higher interpreta- 
tions of the system of Nature point distinctly to one 
fundamental interpretation — the return of equiva- 
lence and compensation in all interactions ? 

" 2. Is he right or wrong in his conclusion that the 
moral accountability of the individual, extended into 
a future life, is fundamental in religion ? 

"3. Is he right or wrong in his conclusion that 
the scientific conception of physical action as cease- 
less and compensatory is identical with the reli- 
gious conception of human action as being also 
ceaseless and compensatory; in other words, is 
Newton's axiom, * To every action there is an equal 
reaction/ the counterpart of the religious doctrine 
of just consequences — that men shall reap as they 
sow? 

" We hope to receive your judgment — whether it 
be favorable or unfavorable — of this effort to recon- 
cile science and religion." 

The reviews were not sought with the 
intention of including them in this volume. 
Since they have come into my hands, how- 
ever, the conviction has struck me that 
they properly belong here — that the views 
[ '5° ] 



APPENDIX 



of so many persons, each one competent 
in his own field and each looking at the 
issue from a standpoint different from the 
others, would be welcome to the reader 
and helpful in this investigation. 

Nothing written in these reviews is 
omitted here. Accepting comments crit- 
ical and unfavorable, I also accept com- 
ments generous and commendatory. I 
reserve the liberty of responding to my 
critics in conclusion. 

By W. H. MALLOCK. 

Author of "Is Life Worth Living f " etc. 

Mr. Orlando J. Smith belongs to the number, now 
happily increasing, of thinkers who, accepting the 
fundamental postulates of religion, frankly accept 
also the discoveries of modern science and endeavor 
to reconcile the two without mutilating either. Even 
if they fail to accomplish their task they are helpful 
because they illustrate its difficulties. Mr. Orlando 
J. Smith is helpful in this way. 

In his previous volume, " Eternalism," Mr. Smith 
has taken his stand on the theory that the soul is 
[ «5i ] 



BALANCE 



a self existing, uncreated and indestructible entity 
which, though temporarily associated with the body 
or a succession of bodies and partially determined 
in its conduct by the physical organism and its envi- 
ronment, still retains an inherent element of freedom, 
in virtue of which alone it is morally accountable 
for its actions. This theory, in his present volume, 
"Balance," he seeks to substantiate by analogies 
drawn from the physical universe, and in especial 
from what he calls the principle of balance itself, this 
being, according to him, the " fundamental verity " 
of Nature. 

What Mr. Smith means by balance is, he says, 
Newton's law, considered under its widest aspect, 
that " to every action there is an equal and opposite 
reaction," and he goes on to argue that what is bal- 
ance in the natural world reproduces itself in the 
moral world as justice. Whatever a man does, be 
it good or bad, there necessarily follows on this an 
equal and opposite reaction, of which he is either the 
beneficiary or the victim. Men, however, often die 
before this reaction is complete, and, unless their 
personalities survived physical death, the great law 
of justice, or moral balance, would be defeated. 
But such breaks in the cosmic law Mr. Smith regards 
as incredible. We are bound, therefore, by common 
sense to accept the immortality of the soul as a fact. 

[ «» ] 



APPENDIX 



Nor do we depend, he adds, on this moral argument 
only. It is reinforced by the great scientific gener- 
alization that nothing, whether matter or energy, is 
ever created or destroyed, and, if the individual atom 
is indestructible, so also is the individual life. 

Such, in outline, is Mr. Smith's argument. It is 
impossible here to do it justice in detail, but enough 
has been said to make intelligible a brief account of 
the faults which Mr. Smith must expect his critics to 
find in it. In the first place, as he himself admits, 
his law of balance is neither more nor less than the 
law of cause and effect viewed under a particular as- 
pect. In the second place, it is, so far as it goes, 
neither more nor less than a system of pure deter- 
minism, and is associated with a principle of moral 
freedom in the individual only because Mr. Smith 
assumes this as a matter of faith, not because he has 
succeeded in discovering any scientific proof of it. 
In the third place, his law of balance being, on his 
own admission, convertible into a law of justice only 
by means of the doctrine that the human soul is im- 
mortal, his doctrine of its immortality is an assump- 
tion, no less than is his doctrine of its freedom, and 
the manner in which he attempts to show that this 
is not the case illustrates perhaps more clearly than 
anything else the kind of defect by which much of 
his reasoning is vitiated. Science, he says, shows us 
[ '53 ] 



BALANCE 



that the individual life must be immortal, because 
science shows us that nothing which exists can be 
destroyed. That nothing can be destroyed is in one 
sense perfectly true, but in another it is equally false. 
If science shows us that in one sense nothing is 
destroyed, it shows us also that in another sense 
nothing endures. The material of the rose is inde- 
structible, but the same rose never blossoms twice. 
Mr. Smith's argument can apply to the soul only 
on the assumption that the soul is a non-composite 
unity. His assumption may be true, but it has no 
foundation in science. Mr. Smith, indeed, himself, on 
page 128, gives his case away when he says that " the 
abyss of death is spanned by the bridge of faith." 
All, in short, that his writings can thus far be said to 
have done is to show what religion insists on adding 
to science, not what it succeeds in rinding in it. 

Bachelors' Club, London, 
June 11, 1904. 



By BENJAMIN KIDD. 

Author of "Social Evolution" u Principles of Western 
Civilization" " Sociology" etc. 

In this little book of one hundred and forty-six 
pages there is briefly put by Mr. Smith the secret of 
the social significance of all the principal religions 

[ 154 ] 



APPENDIX 



of the world. The present position of thought in 
relation to religious subjects is extremely interesting. 
The theory of balance which the author puts forward 
in this book as the fundamental truth of human 
knowledge brings partially into view the scientific 
side of a larger synthesis toward which we appear to 
be moving. 

As the theory of evolution has come to be better 
understood we have in sight what may be called the 
two great protagonists in the drama of the human 
mind as it unfolds itself in history. On one side of 
this drama we have the individual concerned with 
his own welfare and with his own interests and 
emotions in a brief lifetime. With the lust of self 
preservation and self realization within these limits 
strong upon him, he listens, with ear at times fiercely 
attuned, as there pipe unto him all the sensualists of 
philosophy. Now in Lucretius and anon in Omar 
Khayyam he catches the echo of his mood against 
the insolence of things that would subordinate him 
to any larger meaning than that within the horizon 
of his own cultivated indulgence. In still wilder 
moods he dances to Nietzsche, for to that modern 
Fury, slinging flame, the systems of " cow philoso- 
phy " and " herding morality " which society and the 
religions which accompany it impose on him are 
intolerable. Are they not only the organized expres- 
[ '55 ] 



BALANCE 



sion of the same insolence written still larger ? The 
merit of Mr. Smith is that he sees all these impulses 
and the theories of things to which they give rise as 
no more than the broken fragments they really are. 
They form no basis for a true philosophy of our 
lives either as individuals or as members of society. 
They are only expressions of a want of insight in 
understanding the nature and balance of the synthe- 
sis of which we form part. They represent the feel- 
ings that resolve themselves on the larger stage of 
history in anti-social institutions, in the absolutisms 
of politics, in the tyrannies of chattel slavery or in 
the Caesars^who climb to power over the bodies of 
millions of their victims. 

On the other side of this drama of the human mind 
we have again the individual. With a sense of some 
larger balance equally strong upon him, he cannot 
find and is destined never to find in sensualism any 
final reconciliation between what are to him the com- 
peting claims of self culture on the one hand and social 
justice on the other. Feeling responsibilities through 
his conduct to a process the meaning of which far 
transcends the reach of his own indulgences, systems 
of morality and religion are all expressions of the 
inevitable attempt to which the individual is driven 
to restore the balance. Right, in this larger sense, 
Mr. Smith therefore defines to be " the rendering of 

[ 156 ] 



APPENDIX 



equivalents." " Duty," he well says, " is a debt, lit- 
erally a due, which we owe to ourselves or to others. 
The Golden Rule is a perfect law of equivalent ex- 
change, and Kant's * categorical imperative ' — ' Act 
according to that maxim only which you can wish 
at the same time to become the universal law ' — is 
also an exact law of reciprocity." From this posi- 
tion Mr. Smith's development is suggestive. The 
sense of justice in man he properly conceives to be 
the sense of necessary consequences and therefore of 
balance in a larger synthesis. Religion rests on the 
recognition of eternal justice — that right rule of the 
world. Science is advancing to the position that 
balance rules the world, " a position so broad that it 
includes the fundamental grounds of religion." From 
this it follows, Mr. Smith considers, that the truth 
finders are true prophets; that " truth, wherever and 
whenever discovered, is the infallible revelation of 
God." 

Mr. Smith's little book is a system of philosophy in 
brief. In reaching, at the end, the conclusion that 
the fundamental principle of religious belief is the 
feeling that the moral accountability of the individual 
soul altogether transcends the meaning of the brief 
span of the individual's life and of the interests 
within it, he is not far from one of the ultimate posi- 
tions of evolutionary philosophy. He is at the same 
[ '57 ] 



BALANCE 



time very close to what always has been and to what 
probably always will be a vital precept of the highest 
forms of religion. 

Westgate, South Croydon, England, 
June 20, 1904. 

By AMOS EMERSON DOLBEAR, LL. D. 

Professor of Physics, Tufts College, 

Vicissitudes, both physical and moral, run through 
the whole gamut of possibilities in life. Violence, 
suffering and injustice come to the best of mankind 
as often as to the worst, and it has always been so. 
Some, like Milton, have tried to justify the ways of 
God to man with preternatural assumptions, yet no 
one has succeeded with such arguments. Some have 
assumed there is no moral order, only chaos, in world 
ethics, though order is recognized in the scheme of 
inanimate things, even in earthquakes, volcanoes and 
overwhelming storms, and such stoical thinkers have 
abandoned the thought of any ultimate readjustments 
which shall make good all damages to sentient beings. 

Mr. Smith thinks the solution is not so hopeless, 
and he seeks to show by analogies in the fields of 
our best knowledge that the so-called laws of Nature 
have for their foundation the principle of action and 
reaction which sooner or later evens up all malad- 

[ 158 ] 



APPENDIX 



justments. He calls this balance, and traces out 
the process in many fields, astronomical, geological, 
physical and meteorological. The doctrine of the con- 
servation of energy implies that all the forms of 
energy have their exact equivalence in other forms 
of energy into which they may be transformed and 
balance is exactly maintained. 

" Nature," he says, " has no profit and loss ac- 
count, no bad debts, no failure in compensation," 
and this applies to all things, big and little. In this 
he is right. We could have no science if it were 
otherwise. He might have added that all processes 
in Nature go on in a rhythmical way and no excur- 
sion of a particle can ever outreach the reaction 
agency which shall exactly balance its adventure. A 
comet may travel away from the sun for a hundred 
years, but the sun will certainly pull it back again. 

In human affairs similar laws of compensation are 
traced, and here, as in the physical domain, the 
rhythm is often in long periods, but never failure of 
balance. 

Again, in Nature there are no known inconsist- 
encies. No law of Nature is inconsistent with any 
other law. Indeed, this is our test for truth — that 
the statement which embodies it must be consistent 
with every other known truth, and by implication with 
every other truth, though unknown now. 
[ 159 ] 



BALANCE 



All this is summoned by Mr. Smith to give coher- 
ence and strengthen the conviction entertained by 
all religiously minded persons that ultimately all 
the ills of life, all injustice and misery endured by 
individuals, will as certainly be corrected and bal- 
anced. On such a basis the whole of creation, so far 
as we have yet learned, is maintained and teaches 
that lesson. 

There is no reason for holding that there is a hiatus 
between physical things and mental things. If there 
is not, then is Mr. Smith's contention sound and he 
deserves praise for calling attention to the significance 
of fundamental physical laws in their relation to 
natural religion. 

Tufts College, Mass., 
May 31, 1904. 

By MANGASAR M. MANGASARIAN. 

Editor of" The Liberal Review " Chicago. 

" Balance " is the name of a little book with a 
great aim. Its author, Mr. Orlando J. Smith, sets out 
as a new Columbus to discover not another earth, 
but another truth which shall give to all known truths 
new meaning and worth. This truth he believes he 
has discovered and christens it " the fundamental 
verity." Lucid illustrations are massed together with 

[ 160 ] 



APPENDIX 



telling effect to show that Nature is equipped with a 
self curative genius which makes discord an impos- 
sibility. " That which is overdone in one direction is 
underdone equally in an opposite direction." This 
rhythm, this equivalence, which pulls the pendulum 
in one direction as far as it pushes it in another, is 
the fundamental verity ', which, if grasped as universal 
and infallible, will remove from our shoulders what 
Shakespeare calls " the weary weight of all this un- 
intelligible world," and induce Religion and Science, 
the two gladiatorial contestants in the modern arena, 
to replace their quarrelous weapons, with which they 
have given and received gashes deep and bloody, 
with the olive branch of peace and concord. Having 
undertaken to demonstrate that the physical world 
is in the embrace of laws which forever evolve order 
out of confusion, and that Balance is supreme in 
every detail of life, from the most momentous to the 
most minute ; that throughout the length and breadth 
of the universe " the account balances perfectly ; " 
that Nature has no failures and "no bad debts;" 
that balance forbids wrong — such, for instance, as 
the victory of one force over another — the author 
believes that he has found in this fact the unanswer- 
able demonstration for the existence of a Supreme 
Being and the immortality of the soul. Thus, having 
given to these two ambitious propositions a new 

[ i6 ' ] 



BALANCE 



front, he concludes that he has reconciled religion 
with science. 

It is quite easy to reconcile enemies if they let you 
interpret their differences to suit yourself. Mr. Smith 
defines both religion and science with a view to recon- 
ciliation. It is no wonder, then, that they stop quar- 
reling immediately. Even in Mr. Orlando Smith's 
religion there is an element of the supernatural, a 
deus ex machina who from the eternities rules the 
world and is pledged to see that in the end right shall 
prevail. This is theology, not science. Mr. Smith 
starts by trying to prove that Nature is just, orderly, 
and that its accounts are always perfect, and then, un- 
fortunately enough, he drags forth once more the ob- 
solete theological argument which science has already 
rent into tatters — that another life is inevitable 
since this life is not satisfactory. Having shown that 
there are no failures in Nature, he now says, "We 
must admit, however, that justice is incomplete in 
this life." That however destroys the position that 
Nature is, at present at least, governed by a Supreme 
Being, for how explain the existence of " incomplete 
justice" ? The proposition that this Supreme Being 
must be given more time to work in — an eternity, 
-for instance — that he may turn His failures to ac- 
count, is pure metaphysics. 

If for millions of years this earth could roll under 
[ '6z ] 



APPENDIX 



the eye of a Supreme Being and still be incomplete, 
what good reason have we to conclude that the Being 
who has failed hitherto is going to do better in the 
unknown future ? If a Supreme Being and injustice 
are possible now, they are possible forever. What 
guarantee have we that the future will not be like the 
past? 

Moreover, if a time should ever come when ideal 
justice shall prevail in all parts of the universe, then 
progress will be impossible and Mr. Smith's life be- 
yond the grave will go a-begging. 

The man who has one talent may be compensated 
with equal justice with the man who has ten. But 
why should one man have only one talent and his 
neighbor ten ? Will there ever come a time when all 
shall have the same number of talents ? And will life 
be worth living when such a time arrives? Why 
should one be a god and another a mere mortal ? 
And, when truth has completely crushed error, what 
becomes of balance, or " action and reaction " ? 

Ideal justice is a theological dream. It has never 
been realized in the past, and it is not desirable that 
it shall be in the future. 

Toward the end Mr. Smith develops into a full 
fledged pulpiteer, claiming that no " hospitals, chari- 
ties or institutions of learning, songs, hymns, poems, 
noble thoughts or sentiments," are possible without 

[ i6 3 ] 



BALANCE 



the doctrines of a Supreme Being and of another 
life. Thus the science with which Mr. Smith began 
so nobly is swallowed up in his theology. It is the 
lamb and the lion lying together, but with the one 
inside the other. 

Mr. Smith's " Balance " is certainly a thought pro- 
voking volume, expressive of the intellectual quest 
for certainty which characterizes our age. 

Chicago, 
June 18, 1904. 

By EDWIN MARKHAM. 

Author of " The Man with the Hoe" " The Social 
Conscience" etc. 

" Balance : The Fundamental Verity," by Orlando 
J. Smith, is a notable volume, one that will be highly 
interesting to all who take a serious view of life and 
its fateful issues. It treats of the deepest concerns 
of our destiny, here and hereafter, and reveals some 
of the grounds and evidences of a scientific religion 
— a religion as firmly fixed as the foundation of Na- 
ture itself. The book is written in a style at once 
lucid and simple, direct as a singing bullet. 

" Balance " is the work of an earnest man who is 
searching for a clew to the moral order of the world, 
seeking for a principle that adjusts the wrongs and 

C 164 ] 



APPENDIX 



inequalities of this life. Mr. Smith finds this prin- 
ciple in the law of balance — a law that swings 
atoms and worlds and souls upon its pivot. Care- 
fully (and logically, as I think) he proceeds to prove 
the great fundamental declaration of religion — the 
declaration that in the long swing of the pendulum 
right rules the world, and that men shall reap as 
they sow. 

Let me give in my own way and order some of the 
arguments and conclusions of this able book. Nature 
reveals a tendency toward balance, which is the sav- 
ing force in the world. Everywhere is ceaseless mo- 
tion. All things are in flight, yet all things are under 
restraint, under control of a vast principle which 
curbs excess, restrains deficiency, restores balance. 
The sea assails the shore of Long Island and yet 
casts up the sand dunes that hold back the sea. The 
wagon pulls against the horse, while the horse pulls 
against the wagon. To every action, as Newton tells 
us, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Equiva- 
lence and compensation are universal. The world is 
built on the law of reciprocity, the principle of the 
Golden Rule. No thing and no one can escape the 
just apportionments of the unflinching law. 

Science assumes that cause and effect, action 
and reaction, are ceaseless in the world of matter, 
and religion assumes that cause and effect, action 

[ i6 5 ] 



BALANCE 



and consequence, are ceaseless in the world of soul. 
Moral as well as physical accountability stands on 
the impregnable rock of law — the law of conse- 
quences. If we look with a keen eye, we shall see 
that all things are busily engaged in paying their 
debts. Man is no exception to the law. We cannot 
escape our obligations. Unseen ledgers are kept by 
unseen assessors, and unseen sheriffs are on our 
tracks. " Something for nothing " is the fool's hope. 
The thief picks his own pocket ; the assassin stabs 
his own breast. All this springs from the law of bal- 
ance as Mr. Smith has expounded it. 

Do you say that our little life on earth does not 
always right our wrongs and inequalities — that 
Death seems suddenly to break the arm of Justice ? 
Then a moral universe is bound to give us another 
life to make this one swing in balance. Is justice 
imperfect in this world ? Do we see villainy victori- 
ous and virtue trampled down ? Then there must be 
another world to make this world right. Mr. Smith 
reasons, and reasons justly, that if death ends all, 
then the individual reaches in extinction a point where 
moral effect fails to follow moral cause. If death ends 
all, then a man dying red-handed suffers no conse- 
quences, and the law of balance snaps asunder like a 
rope of sand. If there be no other world, Caprice 
rather than Justice sits upon the throne. But this is 

[ 1 66 ] 



APPENDIX 



unthinkable. There is, then, a divine necessity for a 
life beyond this life. 

Thus Mr. Smith reaches a ground in reason for 
those well nigh universal convictions among men — 
that the soul is accountable for its actions, that the 
soul survives the death of the body, and that there 
is a higher power that rights things. I thank Mr. 
Smith for his vigorous and satisfying argument, a 
demonstration of the fact that Religion and Science 
stand on the same rock. 
Westerleigh, N. Y., 
June 15, 1904. 

By JOHN GRIER HIBBEN, PH. D. 

Professor of Logic, Princeton University. 

The search for a condensed formula which will 
explain the universe is a most alluring task, and 
many there are who have been attracted to it. It 
would seem a sufficiently difficult undertaking to 
limit one's inquiry to a single phase of the problem 
— as, for example, the reduction of physical phe- 
nomena to some all-comprehensive principle. The 
author's endeavor, however, in this work is more 
ambitious. He claims to have discovered a concep- 
tion so ample as to embrace in its sweep not merely 
physical phenomena, but also social, moral, political 

[ 167 ] 



BALANCE 



and religious phenomena as well, and all summed 
in a single word, Balance, a principle of universal 
compensation. The primary and most elemental 
illustration of this principle is found among phys- 
ical phenomena and is expressed in Newton's law 
that "to every action there is an equal and opposite 
reaction." A similar law, Mr. Smith insists, obtains 
also in every sphere of human activity. In science 
it is expressed by the formula that balance rules the 
world j in religion, that right rules the world. " Re- 
ligion and science meet," he says, "on the ground 
of the uniformity of Nature : that the consequences 
of human action are as definite as the consequences of 
chemical action ; that the laws of equivalence and 
compensation which operate in the realm of physics 
act with the same unfailing certainty, and with the 
same eternal ceaselessness, upon the soul of man " 
(p. 146). 

Let us examine this proposition, inasmuch as, 
forming the closing words of this volume, it stands 
as the author's conclusion of the whole matter. In 
general it should be observed that there is a serious 
danger attending any philosophy which is reduced 
to a single principle. There is an insidious tendency, 
which operates unconsciously perhaps, to force the 
formula unduly in order to make it cover every pos- 
sible variety of cases. Even in the physical world 

[ '68 ] 



APPENDIX 



the author overlooks many negative instances of a 
most obvious kind — the disorder as well as the order 
in Nature, dissolution as well as evolution, death as 
well as life, the many catastrophes having no corre- 
sponding compensation, irremediable disasters, the 
dissipation of available energy and the newly dis- 
covered radio-activity, which seems to be accompa- 
nied by no equivalent consumption. But, granting 
the comprehensiveness of the formula for the phys- 
ical world, it does not hold invariably and completely 
in the world of human activities. Is it true that the 
consequences of human action are as definite as the 
consequences of chemical action ? Certainly, if we 
regard human action as merely physiological. But it 
is just at this point that the analogy breaks down. 
Every human action is so complicated by its varied 
relations, and is reinforced, modified or it may be 
neutralized by the interplay of the clashing or co- 
operating forces in its environment, as to render its 
consequences in many instances completely indefinite 
and incalculable. 

The author concedes the fact that in the present 
existence justice is incomplete, but insists that our 
life here is but a broken part of a broader life, and 
in a future state all inequalities will be righted and 
a true balance struck. If, however, his analogy has 
any force as an argument, there should be observed 

[ i6 9 ] 



BALANCE 



in human affairs, even in this present life, a com- 
pensation corresponding to the balance observable 
among physical phenomena, and, if his analogy has 
no force, then there is nothing in the uniformity of 
Nature which proves that the breach of uniformity 
as regards distributive justice in this present life will 
be compensated in a life to come. What is proved 
is this — that in the physical and the psychical we 
have two sets of radically disparate phenomena. 
The justification of the one cannot turn upon an 
analogy with the other. While in thorough accord 
with the author's conclusions ■ — that man is account- 
able for his actions, and that in a future life eternal 
justice will be vindicated — nevertheless we must 
dissent from the method of reaching these conclu- 
sions. We insist that the basis for such a belief is 
not physical, but metaphysical, and that it is not the 
world without, but the world within, which justifies 
such a creed. 

Princeton, N. J., 
June 3, 1904. 

By WILLIAM HENRY SCOTT, LL. D. 

Professor of Philosophy, Ohio State University. 

The author has seized a great truth and has 
traced its operation in the physical, the intellectual, 
[ l 7<> ] 



APPENDIX 



the social, the moral and the religious domains of 
thought. His book is not without its faults, but its 
main positions are impregnable. 

i. Balance is, as he affirms, the central idea of 
science. The law of the conservation of energy, 
recognized as the broadest generalization of scien- 
tific thought, is only a deeper interpretation of New- 
ton's third law of motion. It means that, whatever 
changes of form energy may undergo, and whether 
it is expressed in motion or in some other way, the 
total amount of it is always absolutely the same. Mr. 
Smith's discussion of the law of balance in the realm 
of material nature is intelligent and comprehensive 
and abounds in apt illustration. 

2. Balance is also the fundamental law of the 
moral world. Right infallibly brings its rewards. 
Wrong infallibly brings its retributions. These re- 
wards and retributions are constantly being capital- 
ized in the nature of the agent. In ultimate analysis 
the reactions upon himself are the only moral conse- 
quences of his conduct, and the reactions that count 
in the moral calculus appear in his powers and tend- 
encies. They make him stronger or weaker, better 
or worse, in some of his inclinations, desires, capaci- 
ties or purposes. This result is inevitable. It is also 
immediate. There is no waiting for the dawn of 
another life. The effect begins at the moment the 
[ '7i ] 



BALANCE 



cause begins. And it abides. It cannot be undone. 
The agent can never be again what he was before 
his act or what he would have been if he had not 
performed it. More than that, the effect becomes 
itself a cause and forever tends to work in its own 
direction — for good if it be good, for evil if it be 
evil. The balance is never lost. It is preserved with- 
out failure in a single instance and without interrup- 
tion for a single moment. As the author puts it, 
" No sound philosophy can concede that a law of 
Nature can be out of balance " (p. 91). 

Why, then, a future life ? Not to repay present 
suffering with future happiness, as the author holds 
(chap. xii). That is a minor consideration which is 
absorbed in the essential ones. These are, first, that 
the most precious outcome of the universe may not 
perish. A moral being is the most consummate fruit 
of the constitution and course of things. That it 
should be blighted and destroyed seems irrational. 
That it should go on, fulfilling itself more and more 
completely, seems the demand of both justice and 
reason. Again, a future life is needful in order that 
the process of moral compensation may not be left 
incomplete. The moral life is a continuous and 
cumulative series of fulfillments, or, as I said before, 
moral rewards and retributions are constantly being 
capitalized in the nature of the agent. But if death 
[ J 7* ] 



APPENDIX 



ends all it truncates the moral life. It brings that life 
to a sudden and final stop. On the other hand, a 
future state of existence provides for the just and 
natural continuance of the processes of moral action 
and reaction and for the conservation of all moral 
forces, moral tendencies and moral results. 

This view vindicates the author's position that 
moral accountability extends into a future life, and 
vindicates it on higher ground than he assumes, and 
yet in closest agreement with his principle that bal- 
ance is the fundamental verity. 

3. From all that I have said it follows that Mr. 
Smith is wholly right in his conclusion that one 
law, the invariable law of equipoise, pervades both 
the physical and the moral universe. Balance runs 
through all. Below, above, here and everywhere, now 
and always, there is "one sole ruler — God ; one sole 
rule — His law ; one sole interpreter of that law — 
humanity : " 

" One God, one law, one element 
And one far-off divine event 
To which the whole creation moves." 



Columbus, O., 
June 30, 1904. 



[ 173 ] 



BALANCE 



By EVANDER B. McGILVARY, PH. D. 

Sage Professor of Moral Philosophy, Cornell University, 

The main thesis of this book is that "balance 
rules the world " (p. 22). In order, however, to give 
balance this supreme place, the author is compelled 
to use the word in a sense that differs widely from 
the usual meaning of the term. Balance properly 
.means a state in which the forces tending to move a 
body in opposite directions are equal, so that no 
motion results. But when the author says that " bal- 
ance rules the world " he means that if the opposing 
forces are not equal a process is set up which tends 
to restore the balance in the ordinary sense of the 
word. He himself uses the term in the ordinary 
sense, as when he tells us that " a man out of bal- 
ance falls." This ambiguity of the term vitiates his 
whole ethical argument. Let us place two passages 
side by side : " Man cannot defy balance. His acts 
must produce equivalent consequences " (p. 85). 
" Justice, which is balance in human affairs, is in- 
complete in this life " (p. 92). The former statement 
is correct only when balance is used in the extraor- 
dinary sense that the author often gives it. The 
latter statement can be justified only if balance is 
used in its ordinary sense. In the other sense there 

[ 174 ] 



APPENDIX 



is no reason to suppose that balance is not attained 
this side the grave. Take the case of the man 
who " dies in the commission of a crime/' and who, 
if death ends all, "suffers no consequences of his 
sin " (p. 142). If balance requires — as perhaps it 
might should the word in its strict sense be turned 
into a metaphor — that like harm be done to him, so 
that the conflicting evils shall compensate each other, 
then, unless he continues to live after death, balance 
is defeated. But if balance requires — as it should 
in the author's special meaning of the term — that 
the criminal's deed should create a different situa- 
tion, which changes the history of the world to the 
end of time, then it is not true that balance is de- 
feated. He does not reap in his own person the con- 
sequences of his act, but neither does the falling 
body reap in its own circumference the full conse- 
quences of its fall when that fall is arrested. The 
resisting body gets some of the heat thus generated, 
and so does the surrounding air. The author's special 
balance is made good, not in the body itself, but in 
the whole system in which the event occurs. If the 
physicist in studying this phenomenon were to say 
after measuring the heat of the arrested body, " I do 
not find here full compensation for the arrested mo- 
tion \ hence let us wait till the next world, and then 
we shall find the deficiency made good," he would be 

c 175 ] 



BALANCE 



proceeding as our author proceeds when, failing to 
find that the criminal suffers here the consequences 
of his sin, he tells us that " there shall come a day of 
reckoning for the tyrant and the torturer " (p. 143). 

Ithaca, N. Y., 

May 30, 1904. : ^J 

By GARRETT P. SERVISS. 

Author of" Other Worlds" etc. 

It is a recommendation, not a condemnation, of this 
little book to say that its germ is to be found in 
Emerson's essay on " Compensation " and in his two 
short poems on the same subject. A dilution of Emer- 
son is often an advantage, and Mr. Smith, who writes 
with notable clearness and simplicity, will no doubt 
appeal to many readers who would find Emerson 
more difficult. 

Besides, this author has his own point of observa- 
tion, as every author worth attending to must have, 
even when he builds on old foundations. The chief 
novelty in Mr. Smith's book — and he has packed it 
full of suggestiveness — is the development of the 
idea that religion is the counterpart of science in that 
it extends the principle of compensation, or equiva- 
lence — or, as he likes better to say, balance — from 
the physical into the spiritual world and from things 

[ 176 ] 



APPENDIX 



temporal to things eternal. In fact, the idea of " eter- 
nalism " as a theory of infinite justice, which he has 
developed in another book, underlies this one also. 

It seems probable that many readers may rise from 
a thoughtful perusal of this book with new grounds 
of hope in their minds for the survival of human per- 
sonality after death. They will feel more or less 
definitely that a scientific basis for belief in the im- 
mortality of the soul has been offered to them. The 
inequalities and injustices of this world are so many 
adverse falls of the dice of fate ; but, inasmuch as 
those dice are not loaded, although some victims of 
merciless misfortune may believe that they are, all 
that is required for ultimate readjustment and com- 
plete restoration of balance is indefinite extension of 
the play. The great law of probabilities must vin- 
dicate itself in infinite time. The chances must all 
balance up in the end. 

Our author is unquestionably right in maintaining 
that physical science knows no violation of the law 
of equivalence and cannot even conceive of such vio- 
lation. In everything that science deals with, begin- 
ning with Newton's great law that to every action 
there is an equal and opposite reaction, the account, 
as Mr. Smith says, balances perfectly. " Nature has 
no profit and loss account,, no bad debts, no failures 
in compensation." 

[ l 17 ] 



BALANCE 



I think that he is also right in his next step, wherein 
he affirms that the perfect equivalence of action and 
reaction is as easily discernible in the moral as in the 
physical world. This is something more than the 
asseveration of a truism. We are to take the state- 
ment as representing an experience as real as that of 
an experiment in chemistry. There is no break. The 
continuity of the great law is perfect. It runs straight 
through the material into the immaterial (or what we 
call the immaterial) universe. 

This being granted, we must follow Mr. Smith in 
his next conclusion, which is that religion and science 
meet on a common ground, both being based upon 
the ceaselessness of cause and effect. " If death ends 
all, then the individual reaches in extinction a point 
where moral effect fails to follow moral cause," a re- 
sult as repugnant to scientific as to religious thought. 

This is a good book to ponder over. 

Brooklyn, 
June 22, 1904. 

By ROBERT MACDOUGALL, PH. D. 

Professor of Descriptive Psychology ', New Yo?'k 
University, 

In his essay on " Balance : The Fundamental 
Verity," Mr. Smith approaches an ancient and baffling 

[ 178 ] 



APPENDIX 



problem — namely, the attempt to state the whole 
range of our experience in terms of a single funda- 
mental law, a law, therefore, which shall give expres- 
sion to our most complex social relations and to our 
highest aspirations and desires, as well as to the 
physical processes of life and to the facts of the in- 
organic world. 

His starting point is the incontrovertible scientific 
doctrine of conservation — that no atom of force is 
dissipated, but only subjected to continuous transfor- 
mation within a constant total. This maxim — that 
action and reaction are equal and opposite — he ap- 
plies to the interpretation of social and religious 
phenomena in a series of interesting and readable 
chapters. In its complex forms, especially in relation 
to spiritual realities, this principle is more commonly 
called the law of compensation, but the author has 
preferred the more novel mode of stating the higher 
human attributes in terms of physical law, in a way 
which recalls the earlier volume of Drummond. 

The title of the work, however, is, in a way, a mis- 
nomer. It is not balance, but balance tempered with 
optimism. This is involved in the very statement 
that it is an attempt to mediate between the concepts 
of science and the object of ethical and religious 
consciousness. Man's hope tips the scale in the 
direction of his ideal desires, and this passionate 
[ *79 ] 



BALANCE 



aspiration is irreconcilable with the idea of a dead and 
literal balance. Place must be made for progress, for 
evolutionary change, involving a constant passage 
from lower to higher forms, for, not by accident nor 
convention, but as an inevitable function of his own 
nature, man conceives of an ideal purpose in the 
world, the existence of which must lead to a complete 
restatement of the problem of balance. " Nothing 
is settled till it is settled aright," says the author. 
"The good days outnumber the bad ones." "Right 
rules the world." These sayings are inconsistent 
with any balance discoverable in the actual world. 
They are comprehensible only under the concept of 
a life larger than that which we are now living, with 
which the present is continuous. In other words, if 
the author is right at all in assuming this idea as his 
starting point — and it is the one universal law of 
the physical world — its application means that every 
human hope must find an ultimate fulfillment in the 
summing up of reality, and that Nature itself cries 
out against the nihilism of death. 

The most striking discussions of the book are those 
in which the writer analyzes the nature of religion 
and of the hope of immortality. The moral account- 
ability of the soul is defended as the fundamental 
fact of religion, in opposition to the point of view 
which makes its essence consist in the belief in su- 

[ -so ] 



APPENDIX 



pernatural beings, or a future life. These are but 
the necessary results of a logical working out of the 
former concept. In the second discussion the author 
points out that the heart of our desire for a future 
life does not lie in the craving for a continued exist- 
ence, but in the idea of recompense. 

His position seems unassailable on both these 
points. We seek a completeness in the purposes of 
the will which is nowhere to be found in this world. 
Human life is, as our author says, an act, not a drama 
— a set of beginnings which lack their finales. But 
such a life is essentially unsatisfactory and horrible. 
We demand that there shall somewhere be found 
dramatic unity in the world of human purpose and 
action. But this completeness, which can be mani- 
fested only in an existence which contains the recip- 
rocal of every element, stubbornly refuses to appear 
within the limits of our present life, and our impet- 
uous imagination leaps the chasm of death and in 
the bounds of a future existence constructs the ideal 
of a perfect recompense. 

The book, which stimulates much thought, is per- 
vaded by a transparent sincerity of purpose and char- 
acterized by a pleasing candor of statement. 

Sedgwick Park, New York City, 
May 21, 1904. 



[ '81 ] 



BALANCE 



By CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN. 

Author of a In This Our World" etc. 

" The law of compensation," of " returns/' of 
" equivalents," has always appealed to philosophers, 
and its application to human life is no new one. But 
Mr. Smith claims for this law absolute preeminence. 
It is to him the law of the universe. 

His book is short, clearly and strongly put, and so 
full of truths — patent, visible, unquestioned truths 
— that one has to think very steadily in order to dis- 
tinguish between these truths and the truth. 

The author is seeking to establish the perfect jus- 
tice and inevitability of post-mortem retribution ; 
that the soul is accountable for its actions and surely 
meets its reward ; that as it visibly does not meet 
this reward on earth it must, according to this uni- 
versal law of compensation, meet it elsewhere. 

On page 6 is a typical instance which shows as 
well as any how a statement may be true and yet not 
prove what it is meant to. 

Here we find : " Excess can exist only through a 
corresponding deficiency, and a deficiency can exist 
only through a corresponding excess. A deficiency 
in crops is balanced by an excess in prices ; an ex- 
cess in crops is balanced by a deficiency in prices." 

c ,82 ] 



APPENDIX 



This " balance " presupposes a market, which 
Nature does not always provide. It involves other 
conditions not assured. One might say that a de- 
ficiency in crops was " balanced " by a famine. A 
consequence is not the same thing as a return. 

In chapter vi, on the force of " action and reac- 
tion in human affairs," the author, in proving this 
position, weakens the claim for a further reaction on 
the individual after death. He quotes from various 
authors, citing historic instances to show that acts of 
cruelty and wrong produce an equal reaction in later 
days ; that the French aristocracy caused the Revo- 
lution, and Napoleon resulted in Waterloo. Now, 
if the evil acts of human beings have their inevitable 
reactions here, is it then claimed that they have other 
and different reactions afterward ? 

Do they react twice — first in their visible conse- 
quences upon other persons, then in invisible con- 
sequences to the same persons ? That every act has 
its result, or, rather, that every act is part of an 
endless series of transmissions of energy, is clear 
enough, but that the consequent effects come back 
to each individual is another matter altogether. 

Much stress is laid by the author on the prevalent 
religious beliefs of extremely primitive savages, as 
if what the lowest and most ignorant human beings 
commonly believed was therefore more likely to be 

C 183 ] 



BALANCE 



true. That cave men believed in ghosts and a future 
life does not seem to prove these things anymore than 
their beliefs about the facts of Nature prove those. 

Men grow wiser with social evolution, and the very 
existence of such a book as this, the need for elab- 
orate argument based on science to establish what 
our hairy ancestors accepted undoubtingly, shows 
that the mind of to-day does not agree with that of 
the remote past. 

The fundamental verity of universal right may be 
held without this very ancient theory of personal 
retribution after death. 



New York, 

May 18, 1904. 



By JACOB VOORSANGER, D. D. 

Professor of Semitic Languages and Literatures, Uni- 
versity of California. 

I have read " Balance " with the greatest interest 
and gratification. The author is right in his conclu- 
sion that compensation is fundamental in Nature, 
physical and moral. Nature rewards and revenges. 
She is kind to her lovers, stern to her abusers. She 
has a blessing for every ill, an ill for every blessing. 
She has ice and snow for heat, and she has the cool- 
ing leaves of Ceylon for defense against the tropics. 

[ 184 ] 



APPENDIX 



She has poison and its antidote, illness and its cure, 
life and death, as we use the words, both cognate 
expressions of the law of compensation that equi- 
librates all things in existence. 

Moral accountability is founded in religion. It is, 
in fact, the basis of religion. Deity and divinity, the 
source of perfection and holiness, cannot be con- 
ceived without an accompanying sense of responsi- 
bility and accountability. Unless we judge our acts 
by the divine standard, and so struggle for holiness, 
God is only an abstraction with which we could dis- 
pense. On these subjects the views of religion and 
science are identical. 

San Francisco, 

June 26, 1904. 

By GEORGE WILLIAM KNOX, D. D. 

Professor of Philosophy and History of Religion, Union 
Theological Seminary ', New York, 

This volume belongs to the literature of inspiration 
and not of science. It will have the larger reading 
and possibly the larger results. It appeals primarily 
to the emotions and should not be submitted to the 
cool judgment of the intellect. It is, in fact, an ex- 
pansion of the thought already set forth in Emerson's 
essay on " Compensation." 

[ 185 ] 



BALANCE 



Its proposition that " balance is the fundamental 
verity " belongs to a region incapable of proof. As 
our author illustrates, it may be set forth in varying 
forms: "To every action there is an equal and op- 
posite reaction ; " " Effects follow causes in unbroken 
succession ; " " Matter is indestructible ; " " Force is 
persistent and indestructible ;" etc. In other forms 
so Plato perceived, and so before Plato the Hindus 
declared, deducing from it the law of Karma as the 
one unchanging reality in the phenomenal world. 
On this various cosmogonies have been reared, many 
of them, like our author's work, largely rhetorical 
and sometimes fanciful. 

These cosmogonies are simply the principle of 
causality objectified. That principle is not deduced 
from the phenomena of Nature, but is an a priori 
judgment of the mind itself, and therefore is uni- 
versal and necessary. It is partly verified in expe- 
rience, but science is unable to verify it absolutely. 
In all scientific experiment there is a residuum 
which is unaccounted for, and yet none supposes 
that the principle itself does not hold, but the neces- 
sary activity of the mind forces us to believe that 
what the laboratory cannot reveal still exists, and 
that were our processes more exact the infinitesimals 
themselves would conform to this judgment of the 
mind. 

[ '86 ] 



APPENDIX 



But such a judgment cannot be set forth as the 
fundamental verity. It is one among others, and it 
holds no primacy over the other a priori judgments, 
for from this point of view the fundamental verity is 
not this judgment nor that, but ourselves, our ex- 
perience, our consciousness. To science, however, 
the causal judgment is fundamental, not as an onto- 
logical entity, but as a principle to be applied by 
rigid experiment to concrete facts. The principle was 
held long before modern science achieved its tri- 
umphs, but it added relatively little to the sum of 
human knowledge, and in the form taught by Plato 
or embodied in Karma it was an obstacle, for it 
substituted analogies for careful deduction. 

Deduction shows an antecedent for every con- 
sequent and is contented only when all the ante- 
cedents can be detected and verified. Analogy, 
unable to show the antecedents or to determine 
them, is content with likenesses. Thus Karma, by 
analogy, argued that our existence now is the prod- 
uct of former conscious existences, but it never 
even attempted to prove its assertion. It was a 
mere assertion and worthless. As well might one 
argue that the explosion which follows the appli- 
cation of heat to gunpowder is the outcome of pre- 
vious explosions. 

In like manner, the attempt to prove from this 

[ i8 7 ] 



BALANCE 



principle that there is a continuance of our conscious 
existence after death fails. As readily does it prove 
our preexistence, as the Hindus clearly saw. 

None the less, Kant, who most clearly set forth 
causality as an a priori judgment of the mind, also 
argued for immortality somewhat on the lines of this 
book. Doubtless to many it is the most convincing 
line of reasoning. But in our judgment something 
more is needed to establish so great a conclusion. 
As Mr. Smith points out, the belief in immortality is 
so widespread that it may be counted among the in- 
stincts of the race, and as such it may be trusted as 
readily as the principle of causality itself, and, like 
that principle, can find much to justify it in the phe- 
nomenal world. 

The statements concerning the fundamental agree- 
ments of science and religion are in accordance with 
the insight of our time. Doubtless we come to this 
conclusion in different ways, but the signs are many 
that the warfare is at an end among thinking men. 
Science seeks truth, and religion trusts it as that 
which is worthy of our search. Science believes that 
truth is better than all dreams, and religion adores 
and worships that which, in the deepest sense, is. If 
between our formulations of religious faith and the 
discoveries of scientific research there are disagree- 
ments, neither shall revile the other ; but both, alike 
[ '88 ] 



APPENDIX 



devoted to truth only, shall seek its higher form, in 
which our perplexities and our doubts and our con- 
tradictions shall be all resolved. 

The book in its purpose, its high conception of 
morality and its religious faith is to be commended, 
and doubtless will help many persons to a higher 
conception of life. 

New York, 

May 26, 1904. 

By GEORGE BARKER STEVENS, LL. D. 

Professor of Systematic Theology, Yale University. 

This book might be described as the philosophical 
counterpart of Emerson's essay on " Compensation." 
Its central idea is that balance, equivalence, action 
and reaction, causation and consequence, are univer- 
sal and invariable laws. This idea is forcibly stated 
and strikingly illustrated in a great variety of ways. 
To the present writer the author seems to have made 
good his main contentions — that science and phi- 
losophy point distinctly to the universality of the law 
of compensation and equivalence ; that religion rests 
upon the assumption, or necessary conviction, that 
this law will be found to hold and apply continuously, 
and that it will yet assert and vindicate itself per- 
fectly, and that the religious maxim, " Whatsoever a 

[ 189 ] 



BALANCE 



man soweth, that shall he also reap/' is equally a 
truth of science and of universal experience. 

The object of the discussion is to show the con- 
gruity, at this fundamental point, of science and 
religion, and the work is a real contribution to that 
end. My principal criticism would be that Mr. Smith 
presents his points in too abstract a form. Take, 
in illustration, the title of the book, " Balance : The 
Fundamental Verity." Now, balance, interaction, 
compensation and all such words express only the 
idea of certain relations among realities and not the 
notion of entities or " fundamental verities " them- 
selves. So, when it is said that " right " or " law " 
rules the world, abstractions are hypostatized and 
made to do duty as if they were personal powers. 
Law is only a method in which some Being or Power 
acts, and not itself a Being or Power, or " funda- 
mental verity." It may be that Mr. Smith would ad- 
mit all this, for in a few places he uses the language 
of theism, as when he speaks of Nature as " the book 
of God" (p. 133), of " God's justice" and " favor" 
(pp. 133, 134). But this language is rather excep- 
tional, and the author's earlier work, " Eternalism," 
defined God as " the idealization of each soul's con- 
ception of Divine Order, Rightness, Justice " — that 
is, it seemed to stop short of the assertion of a be- 
lief in the divine Personality. With this stricture 
[ l 9° ] 



APPENDIX 



upon the vagueness of the treatment upon the crucial 
point as to the real nature, personal or impersonal, 
of the " fundamental verity," I would accord to the 
book a high character for seriousness, vigor and im- 
pressiveness. 

New Haven, Conn., 
May 21, 1904. 

By GEORGE B. STEWART, D. D., LL. D. 

President of Auburn Theological Seminary. 

The subject of this inquiry is " whether the return 
of equivalence and compensation is not fundamental 
in Nature, alike in physics and in the human soul — 
whether the rational foundation for man's hope for 
a future life, and for his belief in the Tightness of 
the world-order, should not be sought for in the su- 
premacy of equivalence and compensation " (p. 7). 

In so serious an inquiry exactness in the use of 
terms would seem to be a prime consideration, and 
the reader asks for the meaning of this " balance " 
which is the "fundamental verity." He is disap- 
pointed to find that at times the writer speaks of it 
as if it were a law of Nature, as gravitation ; in other 
places as if it were a tendency, as the tendency of 
an August sun to produce a sunstroke ; again, as a 
force, like heat or light, and in other places arouses 

[ '91 ] 



BALANCE 



the suspicion that he is using it as a philosophical 
principle or a scientific hypothesis. The author has 
the true Emersonian disregard (in other ways he 
shows the influence of Emerson) for exactness of 
definition, which is scarcely in keeping with so scien- 
tific an essay. 

His first conclusion is that scientific experience 
and the higher interpretations of Nature point dis- 
tinctly to balance as the one fundamental interpre- 
tation of the universe in which man is an integral 
part. Concerning this conclusion a layman in science 
may modestly refrain from expressing an opinion, but 
even he may ask a question. The question is, "Will 
science admit this claim for this principle, law, tend- 
ency or force, called ' balance,' as the ' fundamental 
verity ' in the natural world ? " and, if not, then what 
value does it have in an attempt to reconcile science 
and religion ? 

A second conclusion is that the moral accounta- 
bility of the soul, extended into a future life, is the 
fundamental verity in natural religion. To reach this 
conclusion he must meet certain questions that men 
of science would certainly ask on the one hand, and 
certain other questions on the other hand that men 
of religion must ask. Some of these questions he 
passes in silence, and others he can scarcely be said 
satisfactorily to have answered. 

[ *9* ] 



APPENDIX 



But, even so, the most that can be claimed for his 
argument is that this accountability is but one of the 
fundamental verities of the soul-life. 

His final conclusion is built upon the two pre- 
ceding. Having established balance in the physical 
world as a scientific principle or law or force, and in 
the moral and religious world as a principle or law 
or force, he completes his argument by showing the 
identity of these two laws or principles or forces. 
In other words, he concludes that Newton's axiom, 
" To every action there is an equal reaction," is the 
counterpart of the religious doctrine of just conse- 
quences. He sustains his contention with much in- 
genuity and many illustrations. But his argument at 
its best shows only an analogy between the physical 
and moral balance, and identity is not proved by 
analogy. 

The fatal difficulty with this final conclusion, even 
if one is prepared to admit his previous conclusions, 
which are essential to it, is that it ignores the differ- 
ence between Nature without life and Nature plus 
life, and between Nature plus life and Nature plus 
life plus will. One cannot shake off the feeling that 
if our author had reckoned with these plus signs his 
solution of the problem would have been modified. 

The author's clearness of expression, his crisp and 
sententious style, his bold, fearless, frank avowal of 
[ ! 93 ] 



BALANCE 



his convictions, his remarkable skill in marshaling 
his arguments, go far toward winning an audience 
for his original thesis, even where they will not win 
assent. He has made an honest and a highly inter- 
esting and most suggestive contribution to an impor- 
tant discussion and one that will undoubtedly carry 
conviction to many minds. 

Auburn, N. Y., 
May 19, 1904. 

By EDWARD L. CURTIS, D. D. 

Professor in Yale Divinity School. 

The author of this work, already favorably known 
as the writer of " Eternalism : A Theory of Infinite 
Justice," seeks in this volume for the fundamental 
harmony between physical science and religion. That 
harmony is found in an underlying law of compensa- 
tion — to every action is an equal and opposite re- 
action. 

In the physical universe this is seen in the per- 
manency of matter and force, whose forms may 
change, but the loss of every old form is compensated 
by the appearance of a new one. Thus the physical 
universe is kept in a state of equilibrium, harmony 
or law by the constant action and reaction of all its 
elements, and the underlying principle is balance, 
[ *94 ] 



APPENDIX 



which " presides over the processes of Nature in the 
small as well as the large — alike in atoms, satellites 
and suns — and that every transformation of matter 
and force, great or insignificant, includes the return 
of exact equivalents and compensation. " 

This conclusion is in accord with the general ver- 
dict of modern science, but it is here stated in a 
fresh, original and very luminous way. The author is 
gifted in the power of direct and logical expression 
and in the use of beautiful and appropriate similes. 

In mental and moral phenomena the principle of 
balance is found operative since human action is at- 
tended with a series of inevitable consequences, 
which may be called reactions, and adjustments are 
constantly taking place, so that out of the varied 
strifes of mankind issues at last the triumph of the 
right. This is realized gradually in the slow progress 
of historic development, and yet in individual expe- 
riences it fails of perfect accomplishment. Justice, 
which is balance in human affairs, is incomplete in 
this life, and hence the necessity of a future life. 

This leads our author to consider the phenomena 
of religion, " the oldest, the most universal, the most 
permanent of the institutions of men." Here are 
found three fundamental beliefs — " (i) that the soul 
is accountable for its actions ; (2) that the soul sur- 
vives the death of the body; (3) in a supreme power 
[ '95 ] 



BALANCE 



that rights things." And balance is manifested in re- 
wards and punishments meted out after death. 

This is sound and true doctrine, and the argument 
is clear and forcible, and the conclusion is well drawn 
that religion and science are in harmony, not in con- 
flict, and that all appearance of conflict has been due 
to the misunderstanding and the misinterpretation 
of both religion and science. 

Thus with the general trend and conclusion of this 
work we are in hearty accord. At the same time the 
writer seems to fall short of the highest truth. His 
physical universe is causeless. His "supreme power 
that rights things " is apparently impersonal. Want- 
ing is the Spirit who may bring men to a better 
knowledge of themselves, the Redeemer who may 
right the wrongs and pay the dues of others, a free- 
dom of Love even akin to that seen among men. 

The conception of a living personal God as the 
ultimate ground of all things cannot, it is true, be 
demonstrated and may involve apparent contradic- 
tions, and yet this theistic view of the universe ap- 
pears to us more rational than that of our author, 
who holds the eternal existence of all things and 
beings with their inherent laws, both physical and 
moral. 

New Haven, Conn., 
May 26, 1904. 

C '96 ] 



APPENDIX 



By WILLIAM N. CLARKE, D. D. 

Professor of Christian Theology, Ha?nilton Theological 
Seminary, Colgate University. 

i. I am no expert in science ; but, so far as I un- 
derstand the matter, the author is right in concluding 
that "the return of equivalence and compensation " 
is the law in Nature. 

2. He is right also in concluding that "the moral 
accountability of the individual, extended into the 
future life, is fundamental in religion." 

3. He is right in concluding that physical action 
and human action are alike ceaseless and compen- 
satory. The axiom of the physical order is the coun- 
terpart of the axiom of the spiritual order. 

Thus, so far as he goes, the author is right. I 
infer, however, that the law thus brought out is of- 
fered as sufficient to cover the ground of religion. If 
I am right in this interpretation, I must add that 
here I think the author is wrong. Religion seems to 
me to include more than the recognition of a univer- 
sal equal and righteous order, or, if by some means 
the substance of all religion could be brought under 
this head, there is need of a great body of exposition 
of experience for which this book appears to have no 
room. The author has made a contribution which I 
[ '97 ] 



BALANCE 



welcome as highly valuable, but feel it to be less 
complete and sufficient than he seems to consider it. 
Hamilton, N. Y., 
May 30, 1904. 

By ALEXANDER B. RIGGS, D. D. 

Professor of New Testament Exegesis and Interpreta- 
tion in Lane Theological Seminary. 

I do not think the author has found the harmoniz- 
ing principle of science and religion. The book is 
interesting reading because of the lucid style of the 
writing and of the novel method of putting things. 
But the argument is sophistical because of the use 
of the word " balance " to mean so many different 
things at different times — things which are not at 
all alike as I conceive of them. 

His conclusions are defective because he leaves 
no room in his scheme of thought for the presence 
of Jesus Christ, the greatest and most potent factor 
in human history, nor for a revelation of truth and 
the manifestation of a Redeemer. His statement of 
what he calls Christianity would suit very well the 
Unitarian and the Universalist views of Christianity, 
two of the smallest of the so-called Christian sects, 
but it is very wide of the mark as describing the 
views of the great mass of Christians, both Protest- 

[ 198 ] 



APPENDIX 



ant and Catholic, whether Roman or Greek. The at- 
tempt to sweep aside the Protestant view with a single 
dip of his pen (in the words on page 134, " There 
are many which teach that it [the law of conse- 
quences] can be evaded — that the favor of God can 
be gained by means other than right-doing ") indi- 
cates an entire absence of appreciation of the very 
element in true Christianity which marks it off by a 
wide boundary from all the ethical theories of reli- 
gion, and consequently from all the ethnic religions 
w T hich have existed or which still exist. The gra- 
tuitous salvation of a repentant and trustful man, 
no matter what has been his past record, has trans- 
formed so many lives and renovated so many char- 
acters that it seems strange that any intelligent man 
should say, as the author does in the last sentence of 
his book, " The consequences of human action are 
as definite as the consequences of chemical action ; 
that the laws of equivalence and compensation which 
operate in the realm of physics act with the same 
unfailing certainty, and with the same eternal cease- 
lessness, upon the soul of man." The aim of this 
argument is to bring the life of free moral agents 
under the dominion of the inexorable laws of Na- 
ture, and thus find the unifying principle between 
science and religion in the "eternal ceaselessness " 
with which Nature's physical laws operate. 

[ 199 ] 



BALANCE 



This would indeed be the sad and hopeless condi- 
tion of man were it not for the good news which the 
Gospel of redemption through Jesus Christ intro- 
duced into the world for the purpose of delivering 
mankind from such hopelessness under law. 

As an interpretation of natural religion the author's 
positions and his argument may receive acceptance 
with a certain school of thinkers, but to any one 
who with wide-open eyes looks about him and sees 
what the Reformation and the Protestant doctrines 
of an open Bible and Justification by Faith in Jesus 
Christ have wrought in the world the book will not 
prove satisfactory. Science will become reconciled 
to religion when it takes into account and properly 
weighs the facts connected with religious experience 
to which so many millions of human beings can 
enthusiastically testify. The effects of the presence 
in the world of the revealed Redeemer and of His 
Gospel message after such a scientific investigation 
will enter into the accepted conclusions of science, 
and the harmony between the two will be completed 
by this comprehension of all religious phenomena 
within scientific, but not naturalistic, results. 

Cincinnati, O., 
May 12, 1904. 



200 



APPENDIX 



By GOTTHARD DEUTSCH, PH. D. 

Professor and Acting President of Hebrew Union 
College, Cincinnati, O. 

Of David Friedrich Strauss it is told that a few 
days before his death he read once more Plato's 
"Phaedon" in the original, and, having finished it, 
he laid the book aside, saying, " A brilliant piece of 
work, but * ein ueberwundener Standpunkt ' " (an 
antiquated view). The same may be said with full 
justice of Mr. Orlando J. Smith's new attempt at 
apologetics. Mr. Smith wants to do what innumer- 
able other thinkers have done in centuries past. He 
wishes to prove that religion and science are com- 
patible, and especially that the belief in a future life 
has not only not been contradicted by scientific in- 
vestigation, but has rather been proven by it. 

His chief argument is that Nature suffers no ex- 
cess, constantly creating barriers to its destructive 
powers — that is, proves the law of compensation, 
which brings about the equipoise in the realm of 
morality, just as there is an equipoise in the material 
world. 

The first part of the book, in which the facts of 
Nature proving the author's theory are expounded, 
is excellent. The author has a great deal of learn- 

[ 201 ] 



BALANCE 



ing, wide reading, large experience, and, above all, 
a brilliant pen, and he does prove that "balance 
rules the world." The great question, however, is 
not " Does balance rule the world, or even mankind 
in general ? " but " Does balance rule the life of each 
individual man ? " True it is, for instance, that the 
sea, in creating dunes on the shore of Long Island, 
has, by its own force, created a barrier against de- 
struction. True it is that tyranny, by its excesses, 
creates for itself such determined enemies that it 
is bound to succumb. True it is that ecclesiastic 
narrowness arrives in the long run at such detest- 
able doctrines that its revolted followers will be 
driven to a determined and successful resistance. 
Thus both the moral and the physical world show 
the truth of the law of compensation and prove that 
" balance rules the world." On the other hand, the 
individual is not benefited by it. While Long Island 
is protected by the sea, other shores have been 
washed away, islands have been submerged, and the 
lives lost and the property destroyed by the tidal 
wave at Galveston, September 9, 1900, are not com- 
pensated by the dunes of Long Island. True it is 
that the ecclesiastic tyranny of Gregory VII. and 
Innocent III. led to the Reformation and finally to 
the principle of religious toleration inaugurated by 
Spinoza and acknowledged in all constitutions since 

202 



APPENDIX 



the Declaration of Independence. But has this fact 
benefited individually the hundreds of thousands 
burned at the stake, scourged and tortured, robbed 
of their property and made miserable by social and 
political ostracism, all on account of their religious 
belief ? 

"Life here," Mr. Smith says, " is neither long 
enough nor broad enough to establish complete com- 
pensation. " This would prove that the author expects 
for every individual life a compensation in the here- 
after. He would find, however, that this general view 
is meaningless unless we have a distinct heaven and 
a distinct hell, and, while one would not have to 
arrive at the great sensuality of Mohammed's para- 
dise or at the lurid hell of the Jesuit Suarez, we are 
bound to have some distinct sentence passed on every 
individual soul in the way in which a jury or an indi- 
vidual judge would render a verdict. This theory 
does not become more rational by the postulate of 
moral compensation. This postulate no one denies, 
but it is merely a wish, and a wish is not a fact. 
Having proven in this one instance that Mr. Smith's 
conclusions are wrong, we have to state that even 
his facts are not always correct. One of his argu- 
ments is the universality of religion. Suppose this 
were true. It would merely prove that in the course 
of history religious beliefs were the necessary evolu- 
[ 2 °3 ] 



BALANCE 



tion of a certain state of mind, and it does not prove 
that they are indispensable. It is, however, denied 
by certain scientists that the universality of religion 
is a fact. Nor is it true that a belief in life after 
death is the basis of all religion, as Mr. Smith states 
on the authority of Grant Allen, and the best proof 
to the contrary is the Old Testament, and especially 
the books of Job and Ecclesiastes. Job xxi, 1-15, 
knows no answer to the question why " the wicked 
live, grow old — yea, wax mighty in power." Nor is 
Ecclesiastes iii, 21, convinced that the " spirit of man 
goeth upward." Judaism has not held merely for six 
hundred years or so, as Mr. Smith says, the doctrine 
of resurrection, but already in the second century 
B. c, as Daniel i, 22, proves, and as is confirmed by 
the Gospel of Matthew xxii, 34, where the Pharisees 
are expressly quoted as gratified with Jesus' teach- 
ing of this doctrine. We have further a clear state- 
ment in the Talmud, dating back to the first century 
a. d., which emphasizes the belief in resurrection as 
fundamental in Judaism. If such is the case with 
clear historical facts proven from literature, we have to 
be very careful with the observations made by travel- 
ers among savages, whose language is undeveloped 
and incompletely known and who are very reluctant 
in talking about their religious beliefs. 
Cincinnati, O., May 29, 1904. 

[ 2 °4 ] 



APPENDIX. 



By THOMAS C. HALL, D. D. 

Professor in Union Theological Seminary, 
It is a sign of the times that men are again seeking 
along philosophic lines an answer to the questions of 
the universe. It is being gradually recognized that 
simple increase in the acuteness of our sensations 
will never give us the fundamental verity in which 
both heart and mind may hope to rest. Gone indeed 
is the high a priorism of the scholastic period, but 
the need for a generalization at once so definite that 
it can be tested along appropriate lines of research 
and yet so inclusive that the natural scientist and 
the philosophic thinker will both hail it as worth 
their tests, is felt as never before. The author of the 
work under review is surely right in teaching that 
both scientific experience and the philosophic inter- 
pretations of life point to some one fundamental in- 
terpretation. He suggests as the key to the universe 
what he terms " balance " — i. e. the return in equiva- 
lence and compensation in all interactions (pp. 61- 
70). Whether his doctrine is really an advance upon 
the dialectic proposition of Hegel may be doubted, 
but he puts strikingly and in sharp, clear English 
undisputed truths of relation and readjustment which 
must not only be constantly reconsidered, but which 
call insistently for a proper interpretation. 
[ 2 °5 3 



BALANCE 



When our author extends his thesis, won on the 
field of phenomenal observation, to the region of the 
transcendental, some things must be taken into ac- 
count which he has not wholly ignored, but which do 
not seem to us to be fully considered. The law of 
compensation is a law of the universe as a whole and 
cannot be gathered from any single part of it. Our 
earth, for instance, parts yearly with heat it will never, 
it may be, regain. Only on the field of the whole can 
we assert the law of equivalence. Now, the applica- 
tion by analogy of this law to the moral life will be to 
the race and not to the individual. The suicide is the 
sowing of the race, and the race reaps the fruit of 
its sowing, but no analogy from the physical labora- 
tory can assure us that the individual must exhibit 
within the bounds of time the law of equivalence. 
This may be, indeed is, the writer's faith, but it is 
founded upon other and different interpretations of 
life's values than those of the laboratory. 

This seems to be the fundamental defect of a read- 
able and interesting attempt at a wide generalization. 
The basis of a religious faith must ever be one of 
spiritual values, and with these the laboratory and 
the mathematical study have nothing to do. There 
can be no contradiction because the fields are not 
the same. The writer admits that equivalence is 
never as absolute equilibrium obtained (chap. ii). In 
[ 206 ] 



APPENDIX 



fact, balance is a mental concept. Its type of reality 
must not be confused with other types of reality. 
This, we fear, the writer does. At the same time the 
work is a wholesome sign of an awakened interest 
in deepest philosophical questionings, and the lofty 
idealism of the author is apparent throughout. 



Gottingen, Germany, 
June 30, 1904. 



By PHILIP S. MOXOM, D. D. 

Pastor of South Congregational Church, Springfield, 
Mass. ; author of " The Religion of Hope" etc. 

This is a small book containing less than one hun- 
dred and fifty duodecimo pages, but its weight and 
worth are altogether out of proportion to its size. 
The author takes a simple and fundamental scientific 
principle and applies it to religion, with a result that 
must command the attention of all serious readers 
and will command the assent of all who are not preju- 
diced. His entire argument rests on the essential 
integrity of the universe. 

" Man," as Sabatier said, " is incurably religious," 
but religion is inseparable from morality, and moral- 
ity has its base in the constitution of things. It must 
follow, therefore, that the scientific and the spiritual 
interpretations of the world and life move toward a 
[ 2 °7 ] 



BALANCE 



common center. The principles of interaction and 
equivalence must be valid in every sphere and rule 
in theology as well as in physics. This is involved 
in the consistency of the divine thought and action. 
These principles must be valid also for a future life, 
as well as for this life, and their existence in this life 
leads irresistibly to the conclusion that there will be 
a future life. Thus the belief in immortality acquires 
a scientific basis. 

This is no scheme of necessity or fatalism in the me- 
chanical sense. Human responsibility is conserved, 
and the reflex of action upon character is assured. 
" Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." 

To the superficial reader the author's argument 
may seem to exclude some of the implications of 
Christianity, but the reader who follows the argument 
closely and carries it out to its last result will be 
convinced that nothing essential has been excluded. 
That the basic principles of Jesus' teaching harmo- 
nize so immediately and exactly with the author's 
main contention is striking evidence of the univer- 
sality of that teaching, notably as expressed in the 
concluding verses of the Sermon on the Mount. 

The apologetic literature of a generation ago is now 
laid aside. Its weakness was its failure to coordinate 
the religious with the scientific interpretation of the 
world. The new apologetics, of which Mr. Smith's 

[ 2o8 ] 



APPENDIX 



book is an eminent example, supplants the old, incor- 
porating all that was fundamentally valid in it, and 
effects the needed reconciliation in which "mind 
and soul, according well, shall make one music, as be- 
fore, but vaster." 

Springfield, Mass., 
June i, 1904. 

By JAMES S. STONE, D. D. 

Rector of St. James's Episcopal Churchy Chicago ; author 
of " Readings in Church History" etc. 

The Christian theologian will welcome this book 
as a clear and helpful study in the first principles of 
religion. It does not indeed touch upon truths which 
are peculiarly Christian, such as the revelation of 
God in Christ, and this for sufficient reason. The 
difficulties that trouble men to-day, and more espe- 
cially men of a scientific cast of mind, are found not 
so much in the superstructure or evolution of, say, 
the Christian faith as in the foundations of all re- 
ligion, in that element or quality upon which all 
religions, of whatsoever name, are built. Back of 
all forms of faith or cult, for years the conflict has 
gone on, and, if religion be defeated there, all faith 
and cult, no matter what their form, antiquity or 
association, come to naught. Into that field the 
[ 2 °9 ] 



BALANCE 



author of this book takes his reader, and there does 
him good service. 

Underlying all religious beliefs is the essential 
truth — right rules the world. This is held and has 
commonly been held by all peoples whose conception 
of religion has in it vitality and permanence. And 
all peoples have further agreed that the soul is 
accountable for its actions, that the soul survives the 
death of the body, and that a Supreme Being rights 
all things. The author, though he uses it, does not 
rest upon the evidence that in all ages of which 
history can take cognizance these articles of faith 
have been held — that man has always had a religion 
in which these elements have been dominant — but 
he endeavors to show both their reasonableness and 
their necessity. 

This he does by maintaining an analogy between 
things physical and things spiritual, or, in other 
words, by claiming that a uniformity of law obtains 
in both realms of life. Thus the immortality of the 
soul, even though the strongest argument for its 
truth comes from man's intuitive perception, one 
might almost say instinct, yet it also receives sup- 
port from the same principle as the indestructibility 
of matter, and the religious doctrine of just conse- 
quences is one with the Newtonian axiom — to every 
action there is an equal reaction. In this axiom, by 

[ 2I ° ] 



APPENDIX 



the way, the author finds suggestion for the title of 
his book. " The fundamental conceptions of sci- 
ence," he says, " point distinctly and with emphasis 
to this higher and single generalization — that Bal- 
ance rules the world. Balance is the key that unlocks 
them, the word that explains them, the principle that 
harmonizes them." In this sense balance and truth 
or right are practically synonyms. 

The reader who has pictured to himself a time 
when sin shall have passed away and righteousness 
alone shall remain will perhaps demur at the appli- 
cation to morals of the physical principle that force 
is persistent and indestructible. He will demur at 
the prospect of the deathlessness of evil, and yet the 
analogy is rightly made. It is difficult, if not impos- 
sible, to conceive of goodness, truth and virtue ex- 
isting without their antitheses. If a man can be good, 
he has also the potentiality of ill. Otherwise he has 
the quality of goodness as a necessity, and therefore 
has it without honor or credit to himself. He is no 
longer a moral and responsible being. So that we 
take the author to be well within reason when he 
holds that, as a man striking a wall receives in reac- 
tion therefrom a blow proportionate in force to that 
which he expended, so when a man does an ill action 
the consequences inevitably come back to him. He 
reaps as he has sown. 

[ *» ] 



BALANCE 



The book deserves the highest commendation. It 
is not only a helpful study in natural religion, a 
praiseworthy effort to indicate the fundamental har- 
mony between physical science and natural religion, 
but it is also written most attractively, in a vigorous, 
honest style, with apt allusions and illustrations. 
The description of the sand-dunes along the ocean 
shore is both a fitting introduction to the author's 
argument and a pleasing evidence of his artistic and 
literary skill. These qualities make that intellectual 
power which is manifest in the work from beginning 
to end all the more attractive, and we are satisfied 
that the book will be remembered both for its sturdy 
grace of composition and for its guidance through 
the wilderness of misapprehensions and controversy. 

Chicago, 
May 29, 1904. 

By HOWARD AGNEW JOHNSTON, D. D. 

Pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, 
New York. 

I have read " Balance " with much interest. Its 
emphasis upon the inevitable working of the law of 
compensation is impressive. Its indications of the 
truth that excess defeats itself are clear. Its argu- 
ment that the universe is manifestly ruled by the 

[ 2I2 ] 



APPENDIX 



right rather than by the wrong is convincing. Its 
proof that the moral accountability of the individual 
must extend into the future life, if there be any 
religious reality, is clear. Its argument that the con- 
tinuance of motion in all things, as an argument 
against death, and that the indestructibility of any- 
thing points to the continued life of man, is help- 
ful. Its claim that both religion and science agree 
in the teaching that " whatsoever a man soweth, that 
shall he also reap," is made good. The law of con- 
sequences is simply inevitable. Justice is on the 
throne. 

All this the book makes plain. Perhaps it is not 
to the point to urge that man needs something more 
than all this to satisfy his need and solve his prob- 
lem. On the side of Nature the warnings against 
disobedience and the invitations to obey are mani- 
fest when one has eyes to see, but the difficulty with 
so many is that they have no eyes to see. There must 
come a teacher who will point out these truths, and 
especially lead the soul to realize its possibilities in 
the sphere of spiritual realities. The world's need of 
great teachers, prophets, leaders into the truth, is 
manifest through all the ages. The greatest of these 
must be that Teacher who opens to men the victories 
of true character, or, to use a scientific term, the 
greatest specialist in character is the world's greatest 
[ 2I 3 ] 



BALANCE 



hope. All the world knows that the greatest special- 
ist in character is Jesus the Christ. 

New York, 
June 4, 1904. 

By GEORGE C. ADAMS, D. D. 

Pastor First Congregational Church, San Francisco. 

I have read with deep interest the book entitled 
" Balance : The Fundamental Verity," by Orlando 
J. Smith. The conception is one that has been often 
spoken of, but I have never seen it worked up in 
this way. It is all the more interesting because of 
its application to that vexed question, the relation 
of science and religion. My own judgment is that 
there can be no mistake in taking the position that 
science points to the return of equivalence and com- 
pensation everywhere. The illustrations of this used 
in the book are singularly apt, and in reading it one 
is carried along to this one conclusion — there seems 
no escape from it. 

We have all felt the inequality of lives that end 
here, and this has always been a strong argument in 
favor of a future life ; that there must somehow be 
an evening up of what has appeared unjust, if it went 
no further. I think it is pretty generally recognized 
to-day among thoughtful people that moral account- 

[ 214 ] 



APPENDIX 



ability must extend into the future life, and that there 
must be compensation equivalent to the acts of the 
life. One of the failures in theology has been the 
disposition to try to do away with the accountability 
of the individual and sink it entirely in what did not 
appear to many to be a just arrangement. Forgive- 
ness of sin is one thing, and payment of a just debt 
is another. More and more thinkers have been com- 
ing to the conclusion that the moral accountability 
of the individual persists through this life and the 
next. 

The effort of the writer to identify the scientific 
and the religious conceptions of action and reaction 
is intensely interesting, and it certainly seems natu- 
ral that the same law should hold in both depart- 
ments. God is not one thing in Nature and another 
in revelation. He is consistent in all His acts and 
is always the same. Ever since Henry Drummond 
called our attention to the identity of natural and 
spiritual laws we have been prepared to see the 
thought carried further. Then it was " Natural Law 
in the Spiritual World," but this is the idea of the 
identity of natural and spiritual law and is a long 
step in advance. 

It has been a fact of interest to many that Pro- 
fessor Huxley so strongly advocated the thought that 
between a true religion and a true science there can 
[ "5 ] 



BALANCE 



be no conflict. It is well that this should come from 
the scientific side. But we are ready to go further 
than that and assert that a true religion and a true 
science must be one, that the same principles under- 
lie both, and that they are only different manifes- 
tations of the same eternal verities. I regard Mr. 
Smiths book as a distinct contribution to the fur- 
therance of this great fact and welcome it as exceed- 
ingly timely. 

San Francisco, 
June 9, 1904. 



By C. ELLIS STEVENS, LL. D. 

Rector of Christ Episcopalian Church, Philadelphia ; 
Special Lecturer University of Pennsylvania, 

The poet Stedman once ventured the remark that 
a large factor in Longfellow's success was his habit 
of being interesting. It must be owned that one can- 
not often say that sort of thing of authors of our 
modern scientific works. To readers already athirst 
for newest facts and fads driest presentation may do 
well enough. However that be, few who open " Bal- 
ance " but will be attracted to it by the quality of 
fascination from start to finish. 

There is ever a difficulty in drawing a line between 
[ "6 ] 



APPENDIX 



science and philosophy, the one seeking truth by- 
observation and the other by reasoning. President 
Noah Porter of Yale, though accustomed to philoso- 
phy, used carefully to define science as the observa- 
tion of uniform sequence. The definition sounded 
dry indeed. But for simple instance Newton's expe- 
rience with the falling apple led to the observation 
that nothing ever falls up, but all things down, and 
this to the discovery of the law of gravitation and its 
application to the universe. Yet even gravity is only 
a name we apply to an effect. And when we come 
to ask why this observed force thus uniformly acts 
we pass into philosophy. 

Such distinction as to exact science and philosophy 
appears essential to a really adequate estimate of 
Mr. Smith's striking book. The conflict in the last 
century between religion and science was not in the 
sphere of facts, but rather in the sphere of honest and 
earnest theories about facts. And there was gain 
in the destruction of some theories and theorists on 
both sides. With leading scientists of to-day becom- 
ing more outspokenly religious, and religious leaders 
more unhesitatingly scientific, such a book as " Bal- 
ance " is made possible. The book belongs distinctly 
to this controversy and is deserving of careful atten- 
tion and frank recognition on both sides. 

"Balance" is a Christian book on a scientific basis. 
[ 2I 7 ] 



BALANCE 



It fearlessly, but very fairly and calmly, insists upon 
the scientific facts of the moral nature of man on the 
basis of observed uniform sequence, and it discusses 
in a scientific spirit the immortality of the soul and 
the essentials of religion. There is an absence of 
the merely controversial spirit. Throughout there is 
reverent and at the same time fresh and uncompro- 
mising original discussion of vital questions. As in all 
scientific works, an element of philosophy is present, 
the author expressing his point by saying, " Balance 
is a word in which are concentrated, I hold, the higher 
meanings of the words order, right and justice." 

The full significance of this dictum may not at first 
be apparent, but contemplation points to profound 
facts of uniform observation — the fact of the equi- 
librium of physical forces, whether on our planet or 
out in the stellar universe, and the fact of just such 
equilibrium in the processes of human economics, 
whether of the individual or the nation, and in all 
psychic motor elements of life. 

The reader will prefer to learn for himself in detail 
how this able writer has applied the great truth to 
religion and to the all-absorbing problem of human- 
ity. But there can be no hesitation in saying that the 
author has gone far to discover, or at least extend, 
a scientific principle affecting religion and life which 
cannot hereafter be left out of account by the think- 
[ 2 '8 ] 



APPENDIX 



ing world. He has made an exceptionally important 
contribution to newest and ripest scientific thought. 

Philadelphia, 
June 17, 1904. 

By SAMUEL SCHULMAN, D. D. 

Rabbi of Temple Beth-El, New York City. 

This is a little book that condenses much thought 
and makes entertaining reading on the profoundest 
of subjects. It is an attempt to discover the funda- 
mental verity which shall embrace the investigations 
in the realms of physical science, history, ethics and 
religion. It is a brave attempt at a monistic philoso- 
phy. As such it appeals to our sympathies, though 
it arouses our misgivings. We admire the writer's 
wise and comprehensive grasp of the facts of science 
and religion and his thoroughgoing personal appro- 
priation and harmonization of them in his philosophy 
of life. Nothing can be more beneficial than the au- 
thor's simple and powerful presentation of the inner 
unity of science and religion. But we cannot sub- 
scribe to his methods. Like all systems of monism, 
this secures unity, at the price of confusion; the 
identification of physical with psychical phenomena, 
facts of material nature, with postulates of thought 
and conscience, things really distinct and not inter- 
[ 2I 9 ] 



BALANCE 



pretable, one by the other. An inner unity will be 
discovered by being true both to science and re- 
ligion, by mental sincerity, not by artificial reconcili- 
ation. 

From the building of sand-banks which defeat the 
ocean by its own force, a beautiful and vividly por- 
trayed illustration of Nature's defeat of excess and its 
working out of Balance, with which the book begins, 
to the demand for personal immortality which marks 
the climax of the first thesis, the author develops the 
thought of equivalent compensation. There is a 
power that adjusts things, restrains excess, compen- 
sates deficiency, rights things. But the intrusion of 
the transcendent world of immortality shows that the 
author's truth is stronger than his theory. It is a 
break with Monism and a return to the Kantian 
thought of immortality postulated by our conscience. 
That the author feels the need of immortality shows 
his feeling of the disharmony existing between the 
inequitable distribution of happiness in this world 
and our demand for justice. But this feeling proves 
the insufficiency of his law of equivalence, the incom- 
patibility of physical law with moral law. He is im- 
pressive in his deductions of the laws of the physical 
universe from the Newtonian axiom, although with 
reference to biological phenomena it is a question 
whether simplicity is not here misleading. In the laws 

220 ] 



APPENDIX 



of mind, in the discussion of moral qualities, he is 
not convincing. The identification of balance with 
correctness and compensation is an identification of 
physical and moral which is really begging the ques- 
tion. It is a verbal analogy, not an identity. 

The author further holds the essential meaning of 
religion, as revealed by its history, to be : (i) The 
soul's accountability for its actions ; (2) this account- 
ability is taken up in the belief that the soul sur- 
vives after the death of the body ; (3) that there is a 
supreme power that rights things, whether this power 
be conceived as personal or not. All the higher reli- 
gions, of course, have these ethical implications. And, 
as we are justified in explaining religious significance 
by the best and the highest phases of its evolution, 
we can agree to the author's interpretation of the 
kernel of religion. But it is a question whether the 
"propitiation" of gods ought to be interpreted as 
an illustration of man's sense of accountability to 
"powers." The science of religion would rather make 
us say that what began as a non-ethical expression 
of man's dependence upon " powers " became fused 
with his highest ethical ideals. 

" The religious doctrine of moral accountability is 

identical with the scientific doctrine of cause and 

effect." As to this we say there is harmony because 

they are not opposed, not because they are identical. 

[ 221 ] 



BALANCE 



Religion transcends the purely physical conceptions 
of science and supplements them out of its own re- 
sources. After all, whatever moral suggestion there 
is in the word balance clings to it from its human 
associations. Religion is the popular embodiment of 
a philosophy of idealism which seeks to interpret the 
universe in the light of its manifestations in human 
thought and conscience. It cannot therefore be 
swallowed by a monistic principle taken from physics. 
This book is the expression of a mind so catholic, 
so beautiful in its simplicity and stimulating power, 
that the unpleasant work of criticism is overwhelmed 
by the admiration of the author's noble purpose. 
New York, 
June 24, 1904. 

By R. HEBER NEWTON, D. D. 

President International Metaphysical League ; author 
of " Church and Creed" etc. 

A Long Islander, writing with the roar of the At- 
lantic in his ears and the curious forms of the sand- 
dunes before his eyes, cannot but be charmed with 
the opening paragraphs of this little book, picturing 
so vividly the story of the strife between the sea and 
the shore, as old ocean, ever seeking a benevolent 
assimilation of the island, is ever foiled in its impe- 

222 ] 



APPENDIX 



rialism by the very force of its ambition — the more 
violent the storm which hurls itself against the shift- 
ing sands, the heavier being the freightage of sand 
carried up to reinforce the lines of defense of this 
hard-bestead land. A fine bit of descriptive writing 
this, and a perfect parable of the truth preached in 
this most interesting and valuable book. 

The argument of the writer is that everywhere 
and always through Nature action is followed by 
reaction ; that the reaction always and everywhere 
tends to be perfectly proportionate to the action, 
Nature thus seeking an equilibrium, wherein is the 
secret of the beautiful order, the cosmos. 

Through a vast variety of illustrations from the 
different fields of natural studies this truth is reiter- 
ated and reinforced until the reader feels beneath 
him the sure and solid ground of science. 

The working of this principle is then followed into 
the realm of mind, through the thoughts and feel- 
ings, convictions and aspirations of the individual 
man, and through the social and political movements 
of " man writ large " in the vast and measureless 
sweep of history. Ideas and institutions act and re- 
act in ceaseless and resistless efforts toward equi- 
librium under the presence of a power making for 
Tightness, and so for righteousness. Correspondence 
binds the heavens and the earth in one system. 
[ 22 3 ] 



BALANCE 



Equivalence regulates the formation of a crystal as 
of a soul. Character is shaped under the law which 
regulates the rise and fall of empires, by the force 
which orders the ebb and flow of the tides. Karma 
is the doctrine of the tree, as of man. The constitu- 
tion of the cosmos is condensed into the word com- 
pensation. The ultimate principle of the universe is 
— balance. 

Man makes his character according to the law 
that whatsoever he soweth that shall he also reap, 
and character makes his destiny, else Nature fails 
of finding a moral equilibrium. Since this is not 
found here and now, it must be found elsewhere, in 
some after life, or the constitution of the cosmos is 
violated. The ancient argument for a life beyond 
the grave found in the inadequacy of earthly justice 
takes a new form and power, as it is seen to be a 
law of universal Nature translated from terms of 
physics into terms of ethics. 

Moral accountability, the ethical expression of 
the supreme law of Nature, balance, certifies immor- 
tality, and in this duality of constrained conviction 
stands out in sunlight, clear and calm, the secret of 
the universe which men have named God, the being 
and the action of a power ever seeking " to right 
things/' to bring about an order of perfectly propor- 
tioned and benignly balanced adjustment, in which 
[ 224 ] * 



APPENDIX 



every due, becoming a duty owed by Nature, is dis- 
charged by destiny. 

Religion's three " fundamentals " — the moral ac- 
countability of man, immortality, God — are the 
three fundamentals of science. 

Religion itself, therefore, essential and universal, 
is one, however many and apparently conflicting 
religions may be. 

Such, in outline, is the argument of this remark- 
able little volume, the author proving himself a 
" wise scribe " in that he " brings out of the treasury 
things " at once " new and old" — old as the earth 
itself, new as the freshest interpretation of Nature 
and of man, the most ancient faiths of humankind 
fashioned into a " form of sound words " drawn up 
by Science herself, the creed of universal religion. 

In all which the author seems to the present re- 
viewer utterly right — right as the order of Nature 
and as " the secret of the Lord " which is "with 
them that fear Him." 

The book is a multum in parvo^ bulking small, but 
weighing heavily, so little that one may read it of an 
evening, so condensed that it will mingle with the 
thoughts of many an after evening, charging them 
all with vital force and sweet savor. 

It is written in a style which makes easy reading 
— broken into short chapters, composed of short 
[ 22 5 ] 



BALANCE 



sentences, clean-cut and crisp and clear as the 
thought behind the translucent words. 

East Hampton, N. Y., 
June 8, 1904. 

By SAMUEL A. ELIOT, D. D. 

President of the American Unitarian Association. 

This is a compact and convincing statement of the 
law of compensation. Mr. Smith writes with refresh- 
ing candor. His chapters are short; his sentences 
ring true ; his style is as crisp as his title. The logic 
of the argument is as irresistible as the law which 
the argument unfolds. We are assured that " Nature 
has no pendulum which swings in one direction 
only," and that all things are " under the control of 
some power or principle which curbs excess, restrains 
deficiency, restores balance, grants compensation." 
The argument proceeds on strictly scientific lines, 
deducing the known laws of natural phenomena and 
applying them remorselessly to the action and reac- 
tion which are equally observable in the realms of 
man's intellectual life and moral obligations. The 
result is to firmly establish the fundamental precepts 
of natural religion and to give us assurances that the 
moral accountability of every individual soul is not 
discharged in this brief mortal existence. The scien- 

[ 226 ] 



APPENDIX 



tific conception of physical action as ceaseless and 
compensatory is shown to be identical with the re- 
ligious conception of human action as eternal and 
subject to the law of consequences. Mr. Smith does 
not allude to the teachings of the New Testament 
or to what are commonly called Christian doctrines, 
but his argument moves to the conclusion that the 
saying " Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also 
reap," is confirmed by all scientific investigation as 
well as by human experience. 

Philosophy is supposed to be hard reading, but 
this book reveals a force and alertness of mind, an 
originality of treatment, a mastery of fact and a ra- 
pidity of narrative that should commend it to all who 
are interested in the problems of vital religion. One 
gets the impression of a scholar and writer who is 
no vague dreamer, but a man of affairs who is secure 
in his footing and certain of touch. He indulges in 
no questioning guesses and no wistful imaginings. 
The line of his thought runs strong and sure. With- 
out being belligerent he is terse and direct. There 
is no dodging of issues, no incoherency of state- 
ment, no special pleading, no philosophical vocabu- 
lary. Everything reveals a free and straightforward 
thinker, uncompromisingly loyal to facts. His book 
is the application of observational science to the 
realm of religious inquiry. 

[ 227 ] 



BALANCE 



The method and order of procedure are interest- 
ing and significant. Theological scholars have usu- 
ally worked from the big end of problems to the 
small end. They too habitually work from the uni- 
verse to the individual, from the circumference to 
the center, from God to man. When a man of scien- 
tific habit tackles a theological problem he is apt to 
approach it from the small end. Mr. Smith begins 
with the facts of human observation and experience 
and works outward and upward. But this author not 
only sees facts; he also sees what facts stand for 
and predict. He puts, as it were, a candle within 
the ordinary things of scientific verification and 
makes them glow as with celestial light. He turns 
sight into insight. It has often been held that, in 
proportion as the processes of Nature are explained 
and referred to established laws, everything must 
become tame and commonplace. There will be no 
room for the play of imagination, and men will look 
down on everything and look up to nothing. The 
fast increasing literature of what may be called sci- 
entific theology is rapidly driving away this delusion. 
We are learning that while science reveals truths, 
declares facts, removes prejudices, it does not banish 
the ideal. A true science only furnishes new material 
for poetry. The unknown lands about us are only 
multiplied. We are learning that what really fills a 
[ "8 ] 



APPENDIX 



thinking mind with awe is not the disorder, but the 
order, of the universe; not the occasional convul- 
sions, but the fact that a few simple laws reign 
throughout all this apparent diversity and confusion 
and give unity and stability and balance to the 
whole. 



Cambridge, Mass., 
June 23, 1904. 



[ 22 9 ] 



ANSWERS TO REVIEWERS 

In reading " straight through " the preced- 
ing reviews as they come to me in type, I 
perceive that their first effect upon the 
mind of the reader may be confusing — 
that the introduction of many and diverse 
views, some being connected remotely, 
and others being disconnected, with the 
main issue, may tend to obscure that main 
issue, and to raise some doubt concerning 
the real question under consideration. 

It is necessary to get our bearings here, 
to take a new reckoning, that we may not 
miss our port. The letter soliciting the re- 
views of this book requested that each 
writer should confine himself to any or all 
of the three fundamental propositions of 
the theory of balance. These fundamentals 
were presented in the form of questions, 
which I reproduce here rather than refer 
the reader to a preceding page : 
[ 2 3° ] 



APPENDIX 



" i. Is the author right or wrong in his conclusion 
that scientific experience and the higher interpreta- 
tions of the system of Nature point distinctly to one 
fundamental interpretation — the return of equiva- 
lence and compensation in all interactions ? 

"2. Is he right or wrong in his conclusion that 
the moral accountability of the individual, extended 
into a future life, is fundamental in religion ? 

" 3. Is he right or wrong in his conclusion that 
the scientific conception of physical action as cease- 
less and compensatory is identical with the religious 
conception of human action as being also ceaseless 
and compensatory; in other words, is Newton's 
axiom, ' To every action there is an equal reaction/ 
the counterpart of the religious doctrine of just con- 
sequences — that men shall reap as they sow ? " 

Some of vay reviewers have adhered 
closely to these questions; others have 
wandered. I take no exception to the 
wanderings — many of them being sug- 
gestive and instructive — save so far as 
they may becloud the main issue. 

For the sake of clearness, I shall divide 
the answers to my critics into two parts 
— " Minor Issues " and " Fundamental Is- 
[ 231 ] 



BALANCE 



sues." By " Minor Issues/ 5 I mean those 
that are minor in their relations to the foun- 
dations of the theory of balance, and not 
minor or unimportant in themselves. Un- 
der " Minor Issues " I shall consider those 
criticisms which, though not fundamental 
in their application, call for further eluci- 
dation or discussion. 

I shall decline to discuss those issues, 
immaterial in a fundamental sense, or 
remotely connected with the main issue, 
which would carry me too far afield. Mr. 
Mallock, for example, raises the question of 
" determinism," and Mr. Mangasarian asks, 
" Why should one man have only one tal- 
ent and his neighbor ten talents?" These 
are important questions. I have discussed 
them at length in my "Eternalism; " but 
they cannot, in my judgment, be consid- 
ered here without prolonging, unnecessa- 
rily and unprofitably, this discussion. 

For the same reason I shall decline the 
issues raised by Dr. G. B. Stevens, Dr. 
[ 2 3 2 ] 



APPENDIX 



E. L. Curtis, Dr. W. N. Clarke and others 
who criticise my work as incomplete in its 
failure to extend the inquiry concerning 
the significance of religion beyond the 
boundaries of natural or universal reli- 
gion, into the region of Christianity or of 
Judaism. I have confined myself strictly 
to the agreements between the different 
expressions of faith. I have tried to find 
that ground only of which the different 
religious organizations may say, " It is 
sound so far as it goes." I have not hoped 
to find a ground which will include and 
reconcile all creeds. The creeds, being 
more or less in conflict, are irreconcilable. 
I acknowledge the great importance of the 
issues raised by these critics. I have no 
desire to evade them, but I believe that 
they are foreign to the present inquiry. 

Under the heading of " Fundamental 
Issues " I shall consider those criticisms 
which touch distinctly the foundations of 
the theory of balance. 

[ 2 33 ] 



BALANCE 



I offer my thanks — gratefully, not form- 
ally — to the reviewers who have found 
something in my work to commend, and 
also to those, not less helpful, who have 
searched for the weak points in my armor. 
In this connection I desire to acknowledge 
also my indebtedness to Dr. William H. 
Scott, of Columbus, Ohio, for a close criti- 
cism, which has been of much value to me, 
of the original copy of " Balance." 



[ 2 34 ] 



I. MINOR ISSUES. 

i. The Rose and the Soul. 

Mr. Mallock says: 

" Science, he says, shows us that the individual 
life must be immortal, because science shows us that 
nothing which exists can be destroyed. That nothing 
can be destroyed is in one sense perfectly true, but 
in another it is equally false. If science shows us 
that in one sense nothing is destroyed, it shows us 
also that in another sense nothing endures. The ma- 
terial of the rose is indestructible, but the same rose 
never blossoms twice. Mr. Smith's argument can 
apply to the soul only on the assumption that the 
soul is a non-composite unity. His assumption may 
be true, but it has no foundation in science." 

I hold that the theory of the indestructi- 
bility of matter and force sustains, but I 
do not claim that it proves, separately and 
alone, the immortality of the soul. The 
theory of universal conservation forms one 
link in a chain of evidence which appears 
to me to be conclusive. I cannot agree 
[ 2 35 ] 



BALANCE 



with Mr. Mallock in his statement: "If 
science shows us that in one sense nothing 
is destroyed, it shows us also that in an- 
other sense nothing endures." Science 
shows us ceaseless transformation and no 
annihilation. Matter, which is senseless, 
appears constantly in new forms — in a 
leaf, a rose, an animal. There is also a 
thing which is not senseless; whether it be 
destructible or indestructible, let us call it 
the soul. Is it also subject to transforma- 
tion ? Yes ; it is constantly changing, grow- 
ing wiser or duller, stronger or weaker, 
better or worse. Under our observation 
it survives these changes. It may descend, 
and yet ascend again, and again descend. 
It may suffer a thousand defeats, and yet 
triumph over all. One soul may dominate 
millions of other souls; it has the power 
to produce roses and fruits and mechan- 
isms and music, to harness the forces and 
to explore the secrets of Nature. It is a 
wonderful thing, this soul. 
[ 236 ] 



APPENDIX 



Turning to Mr. Mallock's rose. Has it 
the power of self recuperation? weak- 
ening, may it regain its strength? may it 
grow better or worse through its own 
powers or consent? has it any dominion 
over other roses, or over the forces of 
Nature? No; the rose, we judge, is non- 
conscious, senseless, with no powers of 
self preservation, self help, self advance- 
ment, self assertion. 

There are other distinctions between 
the rose and the soul. The rose develops 
well only under favorable conditions. In 
good soil, well protected, with so much 
of heat and moisture, it ascends in a 
definite time to its maximum and then de- 
scends regularly and definitely to its trans- 
formation. The soul, on the other hand, 
often develops under unfavorable phys- 
ical conditions. A great soul thrives in 
solitude, or in facing difficulties, dangers, 
pain and persecution. The soul has no 
definite rise to a maximum or descent to 
[ 2 S7 ] 



BALANCE 



a minimum. The soul's maximum is often 
reached in old age, when its body is weak- 
est. The perfection of the rose depends 
upon the strength of its roots and of the 
stalk upon which it grows, and these 
upon their physical nutriment. If its roots 
or stalk be mutilated, the rose will be 
injured or destroyed. The soul's body, 
on the other hand, may be mutilated, its 
legs and arms may be amputated, without 
any mutilation of the soul. The strength 
of the soul does not depend upon the 
strength of the physical body with which 
it is, for the time, associated. Strong 
bodies often contain weak souls. Science 
has discovered no definite relation between 
the perfection of the physical body and the 
perfection of the soul, between digestion 
and intelligence, or between muscles and 
morals. No bread or meat, no system of 
diet or physical culture, has been found 
that will make a fool wise or a rascal 
honest. The culture of the soul is within 
[ ^ ] 



APPENDIX 



the soul. It thrives upon knowledge and 
high ideals; ignorance and vice degrade 
it. No force external to it can withhold 
the soul's food. The supply of good and 
evil, of things uplifting and things de- 
grading, is inexhaustible, and subject to 
the demand of the soul. The soul pays 
in its own coinage for its own food. 

The materialists hold that man is wholly 
physical; that the soul is a product of, and 
necessarily inseparable from, the physical 
body. If this contention be sound, there 
should be shown the same reactions be- 
tween the body and the soul that exist 
between the rose-plant and the rose — it 
should be shown that healthy bodies are 
invariably essential to healthy souls; that 
strong bodies produce strong souls, and 
weak bodies weak souls; that an injury to 
the body produces a corresponding injury 
to the soul. If such reactions, complete to 
the minutest degree, cannot be shown be- 
tween the soul and the body — if the soul 
[ 2 39 ] 



BALANCE 



does not necessarily sicken with the body's 
sickness, or decay with the body's decay 
— why should we assume that the soul 
must die with the body's death? 

These unvarying reactions between the 
body and the soul cannot be shown; they 
do not exist. To the contrary, experience 
shows that the soul is as completely inde- 
pendent of the body, here and now, as is 
possible in view of the present relations 
between the two. As an imprisonment, 
even if it be for a lifetime, does not im- 
peach the ability of the prisoner to exist 
apart from his cell, or to walk forth if its 
walls should decay, so the present close 
relation between the soul and the body 
does not impeach the ability of the soul 
to exist apart from the body, or to survive 
the decay of the body. 

The soul is confined at present in one 
sense to the body, and yet, in a larger 
sense, it is free from the body. The poor- 
est laborer, living under forlorn condi- 
[ 2 4° ] 



APPENDIX 



tions, may rise and separate himself from 
his body, even as his body works on dig- 
ging in a trench; he may re-live in his 
happier days; visit far lands and scenes; 
recall the dead woman whom he loved; 
rebuild the social system which crushes 
him, revel in the contemplation of that 
grand future in which there shall be no 
vile tenements begetting disease, no herd- 
ing begetting vice, no poverty save as the 
result of one's own incapacity. Or he may, 
as he digs on, give to himself great wealth, 
surround himself with fawning flunkies, 
be hail fellow among princes, have all 
that his heart desires. 

We assume that our souls are in our 
bodies, but they are seldom there. I am 
here at this desk, and in a flash I am else- 
where — back, among the friends of my 
youth, in the fertile valley where I was 
born ; I revisit scenes of happiness, and 
again scenes of strife and fury; I gaze upon 
great plains and lofty mountains, and I see 
[ 2 4i ] 



BALANCE 



again the face of Lincoln; I look into the 
future and I see it as I would have it; that 
future is mine completely; no one disputes 
its possession with me; I rebuild in it at 
my ease and leisure as I will; I hear in 
the silence, and I see in the dark; I peer 
even into the great mysteries; I see my 
body carried decorously to its grave; I 
have no horror of that grave, no fear that 
I shall be confined in it, no uneasiness, no 
doubt. So each soul roves at will, seeking 
its own, appropriating its own, enjoying 
its own. The soul is separable from the 
body here. Its larger and broader life here 
is apart from the body. 

We follow the decay of the rose; we 
observe its absorption in other matter. 
And we may follow also the ashes of the 
physical body. But, if death ends all, where 
shall we find the ashes of the soul ? Here 
was a marvelous thing that could rove at 
will, with potentialities almost divine. If 
it be not annihilated, into what has it been 
[ 242 ] 



APPENDIX 



transformed? The materialist denies the 
persistence of the soul because he cannot 
follow it. Can he follow its residuum? 
can he trace its transformation ? If he can- 
not find its ashes, then he must assume that 
it is annihilated, that there is one exception 
to the theory of conservation, one thing 
that is annihilated, the one thing being 
that compared with which all other things 
are of no consequence — the soul. 

2. Swift and Slow Compensations. 

Mr. Mangasarian builds upon my ad- 
mission that " justice is incomplete in this 
life " the assumption that consequently it 
must be forever incomplete; that a delay 
in justice involves its complete failure. If 
this be true, then Mr. Mangasarian must 
assume that the order of Nature is wholly 
unjust, and he must transfer his condem- 
nations of "a Supreme Being" to Nature 
herself. For complete compensation is 
often, indeed usually, delayed here. The 
[ 2 43 j 



BALANCE 



youth does not reap instantly the full re- 
ward of the application given to study. 
The apple tree planted does not at once 
produce fruit. Time is as vital to com- 
pensation as to evolution. Our civilization 
is the product of all antecedent human 
thought and effort, a compensation delayed 
for ages. 

" What guarantee have we/' says Mr. 
Mangasarian, " that the future will not be 
like the past?" If he means this: What 
assurance have we that the constitution of 
Nature will not be the same in the future 
that it has been in the past? I answer that 
we have none. We may be sure that it 
will be the same. But, if he means to 
deny that anything can be that has not 
been, then he is refuted by every step in 
human progress, every new achievement 
in invention, art, science and thought, 
every advance in freedom, fraternity and 
enlightenment — each being the compen- 
sation of past effort. 

[ 2 44 ] 



APPENDIX 



In one view all natural processes are 
perfectly balanced at every instant of time; 
in another view the processes of balance 
have duration. Touching this issue, a phys- 
icist has handed to me this statement: 

" A stone may fall a mile, as a result of toppling 
from the edge of a cliff, but there is a perfect bal- 
ance, during every inch of the descent, between the 
controlling forces and the results thereof. Neverthe- 
less the result of toppling from the cliff's edge is not 
fully achieved until the stone strikes the bottom, 
when there ensues a perfect equality of action and 
reaction. And yet the process continues, for the 
stone is heated ; it rebounds ; it strikes again ; it 
cools ; and no man knows the limit of the resulting 
energies." 

The system of Nature may be compared 
to an enormous business concern which has 
cargoes here and trains there, incoming 
and outgoing; mills, quarries and mines 
in operation; bills payable and bills re- 
ceivable falling due constantly, and settle- 
ments innumerable. And yet the books 
[ 2 45 ] 



BALANCE 



of this concern, if correctly kept, would 
balance at any moment. If there should be 
a failure in balancing the books, the error 
would be in the books and not in the facts. 
As there is, on the other hand, no error 
in Nature's books, there can be no error 
in Nature's balance. 

There are instantaneous adjustments in 
the system of Nature, and there are ad- 
justments requiring time; there are, as Pro- 
fessor Dolbear has shown, short rhythms 
and long rhythms, " but never a failure of 
balance." There are swift compensations 
and slow compensations, each coming in 
its proper time — swift compensation for 
the swift action, slow compensation for 
the prolonged or cumulative action. For 
each breath there is immediate compensa- 
tion in renewed life; for each moment's 
toil there is immediate compensation in 
achievement; for each good act or thought 
there is immediate compensation in one's 
own character. These swift or instantane- 
[ 246 ] 



APPENDIX 



ous compensations cumulate in slower and 
longer compensations. The accumulation 
of toil begets food, clothing and shelter; 
the accumulation of study begets knowl- 
edge and power; the accumulation of good 
acts and deeds begets a sturdy character. 
And these rhythms beget other rhythms, 
extended into the social body, improving 
human conditions, making civilization. 

These rhythms go upward. Other 
rhythms go downward. The immediate 
penalty of each moment of neglect is 
non-achievement; of each evil thought or 
act is debasement. The continued neglect 
of toil and inquiry begets want and igno- 
rance; the accumulation of evil thoughts 
and acts begets a depraved character. 
And these downward rhythms extend also 
into the social body, degrading human 
conditions, retarding civilization. 

We shall, I believe, make no error if 
we assume that Nature's balance is per- 
fect at every moment of time and in all 
[ 2 47 ] 



BALANCE 



phenomena, and yet that compensation 
has duration, not because it is delayed 
or overdue, but because processes, from 
which compensations are inseparable, 
have duration also. 

If the soul dies with the dissolution of 
the body, then death is a knife that severs 
the soul's acts from the soul's compen- 
sations, leaving antecedents without con- 
sequences — a destruction of sequence 
unknown elsewhere in the natural order. 

3. " The Fundamental Verity" 

Dr. Stewart says : 

" In so serious an inquiry exactness in the use of 
terms would seem to be a prime consideration, and 
the reader asks for the meaning of this 'balance' 
which is the ' fundamental verity.' He is disap- 
pointed to find that at times the writer speaks of it 
as if it were a law of Nature, as gravitation ; in other 
places as if it were a tendency, as the tendency of 
an August sun to produce a sunstroke ; again, as a 
force, like heat or light, and in other places arouses 
the suspicion that he is using it as a philosophical 
principle or a scientific hypothesis." 

[ 248 ] 



APPENDIX 



Balance is a fact so universal, and the 
phenomena in which it is present are so 
many and varied, that it presents many 
different appearances which, though they 
may seem to be confusing, are in no sense 
contradictory. Mr. Spencer, who uses the 
words equilibration and balance inter- 
changeably, says (First Principles, p. 500) : 
" Fully to comprehend the process of equi- 
libration is not easy, since we have simul- 
taneously to contemplate various phases 
of it." After considering different phases, 
he adds (p. 501) : "All these kinds of 
equilibration may, however, from the high- 
est point of view, be regarded as different 
modes of one kind." 

"Every living body," he adds (p. 511), 
" exhibits, in a four-fold form, the process 
[of equilibration] we are tracing out — 
exhibits it from moment to moment in 
the balancing of mechanical forces; from 
hour to hour in the balancing of func- 
tions; from year to year in the changes 
[ 2 49 ] 



BALANCE 



of state that compensate changes of con- 
dition; and finally in the complete arrest 
of vital movements at death." 

Mr. Spencer adds (p. 515) : "Groups of 
organisms display this universal tendency 
towards a balance very obviously." Each 
society " displays equilibration in the con- 
tinuous adjustment of its population to 
its means of subsistence " (p. 520). "The 
various industrial actions and reactions" 
(p. 522), "the conflicts between conserv- 
atism and reform" (p. 526), illustrate the 
same "tendency." Later (p. 527) Mr. Spen- 
cer speaks of "the law of equilibration." 

Again Mr. Spencer says (p. 497) : "That 
universal coexistence of antagonist forces 
which, as we before saw, necessitates the 
universality of rhythm, and which, as we 
before saw, necessitates the decomposition 
of every force into divergent forces, at the 
same time necessitates the ultimate estab- 
lishment of a balance." 

John Fiske (Cosmic Philosophy, ii. 64) 
[ 2 5° ] 



APPENDIX 



says: " Considered in the widest sense, the 
processes which we have seen to coop- 
erate in the evolution of organisms are all 
processes of equilibration or adjustment." 
These examples of the comprehensive- 
ness of balance do not, however, answer 
Dr. Stewart's request for a definition of 
balance as "the fundamental verity." I 
am well aware of the need of this defi- 
nition, and I am aware also that it will 
be incomplete without taking into consid- 
eration the relations of balance to other 
fundamental conceptions, and more par- 
ticularly to theistic conceptions, of the 
cosmic order. I have no desire to ignore" 
these relations. Indeed, it is my design to 
consider them in a subsequent inquiry; 
but I cannot, without extending this in- 
vestigation beyond what appears to me to 
be its natural and reasonable limits, con- 
sider them here. For the present I shall 
define balance tentatively, in its funda- 
mental sense, as that -principle or order 
[ *5i ] 



BALANCE 



— manifest in action and reaction, cause 
and effect, antecedent and consequent ; 
in harmony and antagonism ; in attrac- 
tion and repulsion ; in the law of aver- 
ages; in correspondence ; in correlation 

— through which comes universal adjust- 
ment. 

4. " Out of Balance" 

" Balance properly/' says Professor 
McGilvary, " means a state in which the 
forces tending to move a body in oppo- 
site directions are equal, so that no mo- 
tion results." This is a definition more 
narrow than that given by the lexicogra- 
phers. Webster's, the Century and the 
Standard dictionaries authorize the use of 
" adjustment " — a word of broad mean- 
ing — as a definition of balance. A state 
in which "no motion results" — which 
Professor McGilvary affirms is the proper 
meaning of balance — has no existence. 
He claims that I used the word balance 
[ 2 5 2 ] 



APPENDIX 



in this sense when I said " a man out of 
balance falls." I see no analogy between a 
man falling and a state in which " no mo- 
tion results." The statement, " a man out 
of balance falls/' used negligently in my 
first edition and now eliminated, can be 
criticised on other and better grounds, 
since it appears to be an admission that a 
body can be out of balance. A body falls 
because it must fall to remain in balance. 
If a book, pushed out beyond its center 
of gravity on the edge of a table, should 
remain stationary, it would be out of bal- 
ance. If it should remain suspended in 
such a position, then balance would be 
defeated. But as such a suspension is 
unknown in experience, balance is not 
defeated. Since all things are in motion, 
the position of each thing, in its relations 
to external forces, is constantly changing, 
and balance meets each change, in ac- 
cordance with what scientific men call a 
moving equilibrium. The physicists will, 
[ 2 53 ] 



BALANCE 



I have no doubt, sustain the view that 
the forces of balance are never defeated, 
are never absent, tardy or inefficient, in 
physical transformations. 

5. Action without Reaction. 

To my claim that, " if death ends all, 
then the individual reaches in extinction 
a point where moral effect fails to follow 
moral cause," Professor McGilvary an- 
swers that, while the man who, for exam- 
ple, dies in the commission of a crime 
" does not reap in his own person the 
consequences of his act," still there are 
consequences external to him, effects fol- 
lowing his very last act preceding his ex- 
tinction. 

Two sets of consequences follow the 
acts of the individual. One set includes 
the reactions upon himself, upon his own 
character; the other set includes the re- 
actions upon things external to himself. 
In the first set of reactions he reaps in- 
[ 2 54 ] 



APPENDIX 



stantly and perfectly as he sows, his char- 
acter being debased in exact proportion 
to his evil acts, and improved or exalted 
in exact proportion to his good acts. In 
this chain of actions and reactions we may 
observe the perfect working of the law 
of moral accountability. In this chain the 
most secret thought, intent or desire of 
the individual — the hate which he hides 
in hypocrisy; the dishonesty or treachery 
which he harbors; the lust known only 
to himself; the sacrifice which he does 
not proclaim; the sense of honor and duty 
which he cultivates — brings its own im- 
mediate penalty or reward. 

The other chain of reactions — the con- 
sequences external to the individual of the 
acts of the individual — are equally exact 
so far as they influence externals, but 
wholly different in the moral summing 
up. He may be the executor of an estate, 
rob the heirs, use the money successfully 
in speculation, restore his stealings, re- 

[ *55 ] 



BALANCE 



ceive the gratitude of the heirs for probity 
which does not exist, and die honored 
and respected, leaving behind him a repu- 
tation for rectitude which has no just 
foundation. 

It is the first chain of actions and reac- 
tions — the only real foundation for the 
law of moral accountability — which is 
snapped asunder by the annihilation of 
the individual in death, leaving an action 
without a reaction, as is well illustrated in 
the case of a suicide. The individual re- 
ceives in his own character the perfect 
reaction of every act of his life up to a 
certain point, and then he pulls a trigger, 
and, lo, there is no reaction! The chain 
is broken. If death ends all, the law of 
action and reaction has its exception; Na- 
ture's forces are not compensatory; moral 
accountability is a fiction; eternal justice 
is a delusion. 

Professor McGilvary uses the illustra- 
tion of a falling body which, when arrested, 
[ 256 ] 



APPENDIX 



does not contain all of the heat generated 
by its motion. 

11 If the physicist in studying this phenomenon 
were to say after measuring the heat of the arrested 
body, ' I do not find here full compensation for the 
arrested motion ; hence let us wait till the next world, 
and then we shall find the deficiency made good/ he 
would be proceeding as our author proceeds when, 
failing to find that the criminal suffers here the con- 
sequences of his sin, he tells us that ' there shall come 
a day of reckoning for the tyrant and the torturer/ " 

The physicist does not say in this case, 
" Let us wait till the next world, and then 
we shall find the deficiency made good," 
but he does say, " The deficiency which 
we find here must be made good else- 
where. No force can be annihilated. That 
which seems to be lost is not lost. Though 
we cannot see it or find it, we know that 
it exists. The law of compensation de- 
mands its persistence; the balance of the 
forces of Nature assures us that it will not 
die." Religion dares to say as much, and 
only as much, of the soul. 
[ 2 57 ] 



BALANCE 



6. Every Action is Immortal. 

Mrs. Gilman says that, if there were no 
market for crops, there would be no effect 
in prices corresponding to excess or defi- 
ciency in crops. I have used the word 
" crops " in the sense of products market- 
able. If one should produce a crop for 
which there would be no demand, the ex- 
cess would still produce a corresponding 
deficiency. The crop would be worthless. 
My critic adds: 

" He quotes from various authors, citing historic 
instances to show that acts of cruelty and wrong 
produce an equal reaction in later days ; that the 
French aristocracy caused the Revolution, and Napo- 
leon resulted in Waterloo. Now, if the evil acts of 
human beings have their inevitable reactions here, 
is it then claimed that they have other and different 
reactions afterward? Do they react twice — first in 
their visible consequences upon other persons, then 
in invisible consequences to the same persons ? " 

On a preceding page I have discussed 
the internal and external consequences of 
[ *5» ] 



APPENDIX 



the actions of the individual. Externally 
the individual acts upon society, of which 
he forms a part. Each reaction becomes 
an action which produces other reactions; 
hence the acts of each individual must 
have some unceasing influence upon so- 
ciety and upon material things. One flips 
to the winds the ashes of a cigar. That 
action changes the relations of matter 
forever. Every action is, in its unend- 
ing consequences, immortal. The internal 
consequences of the actions of the indi- 
vidual — the reactions upon his own na- 
ture and character — are alike persistent. 
They react ceaselessly, in numberless con- 
sequences of consequences. 

7. " The Ultimate Major Premiss" 

" Deduction," says Dr. Knox, " shows 
an antecedent for every consequent and is 
contented only when all the antecedents 
can be detected and verified." This is cor- 
rect in a general, but not in the very strict- 
[ 2 59 ] 



BALANCE 



est, sense. Since there are antecedents of 
antecedents back to infinity, it would be 
impossible to discover all, even in the 
simplest case of reasoning. The same may 
be said, even with more force, of reason- 
ing through consequences, since there will 
be consequences on to infinity, most of 
them as yet unknown. Reasoning would 
break down completely, in view of these 
facts, but for one important consideration 
— the uniformity of Nature — which, as 
John Stuart Mill says, " will appear as the 
ultimate major premiss of all inductions." 
Recognizing a grain of corn, I recognize 
that, because of the uniformity of Nature, 
its antecedents are the same as the ante- 
cedents of all corn, and I can trace its his- 
tory in the history of all corn so far as that 
history is known. In the same way, I am 
absolutely sure concerning its potential 
consequences — that, planted, it may pro- 
duce an ear of corn, that this ear planted 
may produce more corn, that the increas- 
[ 260 ] 



APPENDIX 



ing product may be turned into food in 
various forms, with consequent benefits, 
or into whisky, with consequent misery 
and perhaps crime, etc. 

8. The Galveston Disaster. 
Dr. Deutsch says: 

"Thus both the moral and the physical world 
show the truth of the law of compensation and 
prove that ' balance rules the world/ On the other 
hand, the individual is not benefited by it. While 
Long Island is protected by the sea, other shores 
have been washed away, islands have been sub- 
merged, and the lives lost and the property de- 
stroyed by the tidal wave at Galveston, September 9, 
1900, are not compensated by the dunes of Long 
Island. True it is that the ecclesiastic tyranny of 
Gregory VII. and Innocent III. led to the Refor- 
mation, and finally to the principle of religious tol- 
eration inaugurated by Spinoza and acknowledged 
in all constitutions since the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. But has this fact benefited individually 
the hundreds of thousands burned at the stake, 
scourged and tortured, robbed of their property and 
made miserable by social and political ostracism, 
all on account of their religious belief ?" 

[ **i ] 



BALANCE 



I used the conflict between the ocean 
and the shore of Long Island as an illus- 
tration of excess defeating itself. I do not, 
of course, claim that the land is always 
victorious in a contest with the sea. We 
are apt to look with partiality upon the 
land since it is essential to our exist- 
ence, and because it seems to be less 
belligerent than the sea, but we must 
admit that excess may exist in the land 
as well as the sea, and that, if the land 
encroaches upon the sea, the sea may 
also encroach upon the land. The whole 
of Long Island was perhaps originally 
composed of dunes and is a conquest of 
the sea. We cannot assume that balance 
is defeated if we find a corresponding 
conquest of the land by the sea. Doubt- 
less the solid ground of Long Island 
was contributed by " other shores " which 
"have been washed away." What the 
land gained in one place, it lost in another. 
The ocean robbed the New Jersey coast, 
[ 262 ] 



APPENDIX 



and yielded its prey to Long Island, fur- 
nishing a beautiful illustration of Mr. 
Markham's theory that "the thief picks 
his own pocket." 

The destruction at Galveston is cer- 
tainly " not compensated by the dunes 
of Long Island." If, however, my critic 
should visit Galveston now, he would find 
that city protected by a formidable sea 
wall. The present security is the conse- 
quence of the destructive inundation of 
1900. Again, excess has set at work 
forces to defeat itself. Life was always 
insecure in Galveston before the great 
flood; now, because of the disaster, the 
people are safe from the sea. 

But what of the lives lost in Galves- 
ton? of the hundreds of thousands burned 
at the stake during the dark ages? my 
critic asks. Where shall we look for their 
compensation? These are important ques- 
tions which cannot be answered briefly. 
I have tried to answer them elsewhere. 
[ 263 ] 



BALANCE 



I will say, however, in passing, that reli- 
gion denies that these victims of the vio- 
lence of Nature or of the fiendishness of 
man are really dead. Religion affirms that 
floods do not drown, that fire does not 
consume, the soul. 

9. "Minor" or "Fundamental" 

The question may be raised whether 
all of the preceding topics are correctly 
classed by me as " Minor Issues." 

My theme is the fundamental har- 
mony between science and natural reli- 
gion. This harmony, if it exists, can be 
discovered only by inquiring what is fun- 
damental in science on the one hand, 
and what is fundamental in religion on 
the other hand, and by a final compari- 
son of the results of these two inquiries. 
I have pursued this method, and have 
reached definite conclusions. It follows 
that a fundamental criticism of my posi- 
tion must attack one, or more than one, 
[ 264 ] 



APPENDIX 



of my three conclusions: (i) my conclu- 
sion concerning the foundations of sci- 
ence; or (2) my conclusion concerning 
the foundations of religion; or (3) my 
conclusion concerning the resulting har- 
mony between science and religion. The 
criticisms which I have considered up to 
this point have challenged none of these 
three fundamental conclusions ; and con- 
sequently these criticisms are classed cor- 
rectly as minor in their relations to my 
main position. 



c 265 ] 



II. FUNDAMENTAL ISSUES. 

I shall now consider the criticisms touch- 
ing directly the three fundamental ques- 
tions. 

The First Question. 

" i. Is the author right or wrong in his 
conclusion that scientific experience and 
the higher interpretations of the system of 
Nature point distinctly to one fundamental 
interpretation — the return of equivalence 
and compensation in all interactions ? " 

Of this issue Professor Hibben says that 
I have overlooked 

" the dissipation of available energy and the newly 
discovered radio-activity, which seems to be accom- 
panied by no equivalent consumption. " 

If it should be true that there is a dis- 
sipation of available energy which is re- 
ducing the total energy of the universe, 
and if it be true also that the newly dis- 
covered radio-activity is really accompa- 
[ 266 ] 



APPENDIX 



nied by no equivalent consumption, then 
these discoveries would overthrow New- 
ton's axiom concerning the reciprocity 
of action and reaction, and also the law 
of the conservation of energy, and other 
fundamental concepts now accepted by 
science as essential to the comprehension 
of the processes of Nature. I must deny, 
however, that any instance of an actual 
loss of energy, or of a failure of the law of 
action and reaction, is known to science. 

Dr. Knox says that the theory of balance 
— " set forth in varying forms : ' To every 
action there is an equal and opposite reac- 
tion;' 'Effects follow causes in unbroken 
succession; ' ' Matter is indestructible; ' 
' Force is persistent and indestructible, 5 
etc." — " belongs to a region incapable of 
proof." Dr. Knox questions the demon- 
strability of the fundamental conceptions 
of science. He does not question their 
truth or value; indeed, he characterizes 
[ 2*7 ] 



BALANCE 



these judgments as " universal and neces- 
sary " and to science fundamental. The 
fundamental judgments of science are not 
speculations; they are the substantial re- 
sults of scientific experience. They are, 
I believe, in the highest degree demon- 
strable, being the inevitable and well tried 
deductions from all, or nearly all, scientific 
experimentation and observation. 

The Second Question. 

" 2. Is the author right or wrong in his 
conclusion that the moral accountability 
of the individual, extended into a future 
life, is fundamental in religion ?" 

Dr. Deutsch says: 

" Nor is it true that a belief in life after death is 
the basis of all religion, as Mr. Smith states on the 
authority of Grant Allen, and the best proof to the 
contrary is the Old Testament, and especially 
the books of Job and Ecclesiastes." 

I have not asserted that a belief in a 
future life is " the basis of all religion," but 
I do claim that the recognition of a future 
[ 268 ] 



APPENDIX 



life is one of the foundations of religion. 
I have discussed (p. 113) the materialism 
of the ancient Hebrews, and shown that 
Judaism in time repudiated its early ma- 
terialism and accepted the doctrine of the 
immortality of the soul. Dr. Deutsch sets 
this conversion back fourteen hundred 
years before the time of Maimonides r to 
which I referred. If he is right in this, he 
has strengthened my case by showing that 
the Hebrews revolted against the doctrine 
of annihilation .at a much earlier time than 
that indicated in my statement. I might 
take issue with Dr. Deutsch concerning the 
time of the complete and formal repudia- 
tion of materialism by the Hebrew church, 
but the question is immaterial here. The 
fact of the conversion is important; its 
date is unimportant. 

I have endeavored to show by the his- 
tory of religion, and by an analysis of the 
essence and substance of religion, that 
materialism is an irreligious doctrine. I 
[ 269 ] 



BALANCE 



have admitted that it has been taught, in 
rare and exceptional cases, as a religious 
doctrine, even as other irreligious theories 
have been advanced in the name of reli- 
gion. In one or two of the many organiza- 
tions classed as religious, of which we have 
accurate knowledge, materialism was ac- 
cepted for a time; in none has it survived. 
Dr. Deutsch contends, apparently, that 
materialism cannot be designated as irre- 
ligious, since it was accepted by the early 
Hebrews. But it is rejected by the later 
Hebrews, who have adopted the opposite 
doctrine, that the soul survives death. If 
the soul survives death, then the theory of 
materialism is erroneous. The creed of 
modern Judaism, in accepting the survival 
of the soul, declares that the materialism 
of the early Hebrews is erroneous. That 
which is erroneous cannot be religious. 

Dr. Riggs challenges and resents my 
definition of religion. He says: 
[ 270 ] 



APPENDIX 



"The gratuitous salvation of a repentant and 
trustful man, no matter what has been his past rec- 
ord, has transformed so many lives and renovated 
so many characters that it seems strange that any 
intelligent man should say, as the author does in the 
last sentence of his book, " The consequences of hu- 
man action are as definite as the consequences of 
chemical action ; that the laws of equivalence and 
compensation which operate in the realm of physics 
act with the same unfailing certainty, and with the 
same eternal ceaselessness, upon the soul of man.' " 

Commenting upon this quotation from 
me, Dr. Riggs says: 

" This would indeed be the sad and hopeless con- 
dition of man were it not for the good news which 
the Gospel of redemption through Jesus Christ intro- 
duced into the world for the purpose of delivering 
mankind from such hopelessness under law." 

Dr. Riggs expresses his views with 
commendable clearness and candor. His 
understanding of the meaning of religion 
— expressed in the doctrine of "gratui- 
tous salvation/ 5 and in his theory that the 
" condition of man " would be " sad and 
[ 2 7i ] 



BALANCE 



hopeless" if the individual were compelled 
to reap as he sows — is so completely an- 
tipodal to my position that controversy 
on this issue would be profitless here. 
Having presented Dr. Riggs's dissent, I 
decline combat. 

The Third Question. 

"3. Is the author right or wrong in 
his conclusion that the scientific concep- 
tion of physical action as ceaseless and 
compensatory is identical with the reli- 
gious conception of human action as be- 
ing also ceaseless and compensatory; in 
other words, is Newton's axiom, 'To 
every action there is an equal reaction/ 
the counterpart of the religious doctrine 
of just consequences — that men shall 
reap as they sow?" 

Dr. Schulman protests against 

" the identification of physical with psychical phe- 
nomena, facts of material nature, with postulates of 
thought and conscience, things really distinct and 
not interpretable, one by the other." 

He refers later to "the incompatibility 
of physical law with moral law." 
[ 272 ] 



APPENDIX 



Professor Hibben also says: 

" What is proved is this — that in the physical 
and the psychical we have two sets of radically dis- 
parate phenomena." 

Dr. Riggs says that the harmony be- 
tween religion and science will be com- 
pleted by a " comprehension of all religious 
phenomena within scientific, but not natu- 
ralistic, results." 

The language in these quotations is the 
language of supernaturalism. I shall not 
antagonize the theory of supernaturalism 
here, save by saying that which cannot 
well be left unsaid — that science knows 
nothing of the " incompatibility of phys- 
ical law with moral law," or of " two sets 
of radically disparate phenomena," or of 
any phenomena which may be " scientific, 
but not naturalistic." 

Assuming the truth of all that is funda- 
mental in the theory of supernaturalism 
— that the universe is ruled by a su- 
preme Supernatural Being, omnipotent, 
[ 2 73 ] 



BALANCE 



omniscient and omnipresent — we must 
assume also that the processes and laws 
of Nature are his processes and laws. If 
we find incompatibility of physical law 
with moral law, the incompatibility is his ; 
if we find conflicting phenomena, the con- 
flict is his. If we find order in Nature, it 
is his order; if we find disorder, it is his 
disorder; if we find universal and exact 
compensation in all natural processes, we 
know that Nature vindicates him; if we 
find that natural processes are not com- 
pensatory, that they are inexact or de- 
fective, we know that Nature condemns 
him. 

Why do these critics insist that God has 
two ways, incompatible or disparate, of 
governing the universe? Are both ways 
just? Then they are not incompatible or 
disparate. If both ways are just, then they 
are one, not two. Is one way just, and the 
other unjust? Then God is both just and 
unjust. 

[ 2 74 ] 



APPENDIX 



If my critics are convinced that any of 
Nature's processes are not compensatory, 
if they have sought in vain for complete 
rectitude in natural law, then they do well 
to stand by the truth as they see it; but 
they cannot avoid these consequences of 
their position: If Nature's processes are 
not compensatory, then God's processes 
are not compensatory; if my critics have 
sought in vain for complete rectitude in 
natural law, then they have sought in vain 
for complete rectitude in God. They can- 
not separate God from Nature. 

Dr. Stewart says: 

" Having established balance in the physical world 
as a scientific principle or law or force, and in the 
moral and religious world as a principle or law or 
force, he completes his argument by showing the 
identity of these two laws or principles or forces. 
In other words, he concludes that Newton's axiom, 
'To every action there is an equal reaction/ is the 
counterpart of the religious doctrine of just conse- 
quences. He sustains his contention with much in- 
genuity and many illustrations. But his argument at 
C 2 7S ] 



BALANCE 



its best shows only an analogy between the physical 
and moral balance, and identity is not proved by 
analogy." 

The scientific conception of physical 
action is this: It is ceaseless and com- 
pensatory. 

The religious conception of human 
action is this: It is ceaseless and com- 
pensatory. 

If Dr. Stewart had set these two con- 
ceptions in close comparison with each 
other, as in the two preceding paragraphs, 
he would have concluded, I am sure, that 
they are identical, not analogous. Both 
are interpretations of one law — the law 
of exact consequences, of ceaseless com- 
pensation. 

The two conceptions are not identical 
by accident. The uniformity of Nature de- 
mands that they shall be identical. 

We have no difficulty in thinking of 
physical consequences as exact. All ex- 
perience shows that they are exact. Ex- 
[ 276 ] 



APPENDIX 



tending this one law of exact consequences 
into the realm of the soul, we perceive that 
the one law establishes the religious theory 
of moral accountability, and the rightness 
of the cosmic order. We cannot doubt 
that this one law is that which religious 
thought has sought to comprehend in all 
stages of civilization, and with increasing 
success as men have grown in knowledge 
and grasped higher ideals. The very same 
law which is recognized by science as fun- 
damental in the physical world, establishes 
perfect justice, infinite and eternal, when 
extended into the world of souls. Applied 
to matter and force, this one law explains 
the marvelous order in the material uni- 
verse; applied to the individual, it becomes 
the noblest philosophy that the human 
mind can grasp. For it explains the dark 
problem of evil, and it vindicates the jus- 
tice of God. 

Shall we say that this one law operates 
only in the physical world ? Then we deny 
[ *H ] 



BALANCE 



the uniformity of Nature. Shall we say 
that we must not claim compensation for 
the soul because we cannot follow the soul 
and trace out its complete compensations ? 
That is not the method of science. New- 
ton did not affirm that gravitation existed 
only so far as he could see or observe it. 
He affirmed that gravitation was universal. 
Modern science affirms also that gravita- 
tion and all other laws and ways of Nature 
are universal. The science of astronomy 
has advanced only through the postulation 
that the very same laws of gravitation and 
of cause and effect operate in the remotest 
parts of the universe as they operate here 
— that these laws are there because they 
are here. Scientific minds are bold and 
courageous in affirming the uniformity 
of Nature. Religious minds may find in- 
spiration and good example in this lofty 
courage, in this sublime faith, of science. 
Religious men may take their stand also, 
firmly and impregnably, upon the unif orm- 
[ 278 ] 



APPENDIX 



ity of Nature. As scientific men affirm 
that the law is the same here, there and 
everywhere, and that distance or time or 
transformation cannot change the law, so 
religious men may affirm that the law of 
compensation is there beyond the grave 
because it is here, that distance or time or 
death cannot change the law. 



[ 2 79 ] 



INDEX 



Accidents, not really such, 85. 
Accountability, moral, a funda- 
mental religious belief , 104-110, 
119, 120, 128, 130, 185 ; a prin- 
ciple recognized by law, 139, 
140 ; transcends individual life, 
157; perfect working of, shown 
in growth of character, 255, 256 ; 
agrees with cosmic order, 277. 
Action and reaction, universal, 15, 
20-22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 50-53, 120, 
142, 152, 165, 254-257. 

Adams, George C, his criticism of 
Balance, 214-216. 

Allen, Grant, quoted, on immor- 
tality, in, 112. 

Alternatives, balancing of, 62-65. 

Alviella, Eugene Goblet, Comte 
d\ See Goblet d' Alviella, Eu- 
gene, Comte. 

Analogy, method of reasoning by, 
187. 

Annihilation of the soul. See 
Materialism. 

Answers to reviewers, 230-279 ; 
method explained, 230-234 ; 
"minor issues," 235-265 ; " fun- 
damental issues," 266-279. 

Antagonism of forces, 35-37. 

Antisthenes, 39. 

Archimedes's law, 27. 

Aristotle, quoted, 78. 

Astronomy, illustrates laws of 
balance, 24. 

Attraction and repulsion, 17, 18. 

Bacon, Francis, his attitude to- 
ward the Copernican theory, 130. 

Balance, shown in action of sea 
and shore on each other, 1-4 ; in 
the laws of chance, 4-7 ; in rela- 
tion of crops and prices, 6, 7 ; 
everywhere maintained, 12; 
rules the world, 22, 23 ; forbids 

r 28 



a victory of weakness over 
strength, 37 '■> includes order, 
right, and justice, 80-82; is su- 
preme and single, 83 ; failures 
of balance apparent only, 84- 
91 ; opinions of critics on the 
author's statement of this prin- 
ciple, 152-229; definition, 248- 
252 ; illustrations, 252. 

Beauty, not physical alone, 74. 

Brahma, 117. 

Brinton, quoted, on duty, no; 
on communion of man with 
spiritual powers, 112. 

Buddhism, it 6, 117. 

Burns, Robert, his hold on our 
affection, 95. 

Buying and selling, moral, 73-77. 

Caesar, hero of the pagans, 45 ; 
references to, 56, 77, 95. 

Caird, Edward, quoted, on devel- 
opment, 103, 104. 

Causality, principle of, 186, 187. 

Causation, law of, 54, 82. 

Cause and effect, 16, 17, 120. 

Chance, laws of, 4-7. 

Chemistry, illustrates laws of bal- 
ance, 24-26. 

Chinese, their belief in a future 
life, 114. 

Christ's position in Protestant 
theology, 198, 200, 214. See 
also Christianity. 

Christianity, brought about reac- 
tion from pagan excess, 44 ; but 
excess of asceticism developed 
in its own ranks, 45 ; form of, 
set forth in Balance, 198-200, 
208. 

Civilization, progress of, 37, 38, 
129. 

Clarke, William N., his criticism 
of Balance, 197, 198, 233. 

■ ] 



INDEX 



Columbus, 95. 

Compensation, fundamental in 
Nature, 8 ; always existent in 
the physical world, 28-30 ; in 
human life also, 31-33, 76, 77, 
86 ; but incomplete in the pres- 
ent life, 92-98 ; recognized by 
science, 129, 138 ; sometimes 
swift, sometimes slow, 243-248 ; 
but acting to eternity, 278, 279. 

Compensation, Emerson's, refer- 
ences to, 176, 185, 189. 

Confucius, philosophy of , 114, 140. 

Consequences, law of, the key of 
all action, 54-60 ; recognition of, 
in primitive religions, 106, 107 ; 
supremacy of, in the realm of 
the soul, 277. 

Convulsions of Nature all have 
adequate causes, 84, 85. 

Copernican theory, Bacon's atti- 
tude toward, 130. 

Cosmic Philosophy, Fiske's, quota- 
tion from, on equilibration, 250, 
251. 

Cousin, Victor, quoted, on justice, 
7 S. 

Credit, in business, 7^. 

Creeds, revision of, 133. 

Criticisms of Balance: the Fun- 
damental Verity, 149-229. 

Crusades, a reaction from asceti- 
cism, 46 ; results of, 46. 

Curtis, Edward L., his criticism 
of Balance, 194-196, 233. 

Cynics, 39. 

D'Alviella. See Goblet d'Alviella, 
Eugene, Comte. 

Darwin's theory of natural selec- 
tion, 4. 

Decalogue, effective because in ac- 
cordance with Nature, 60 ; does 
not always aid, 64. 

Deduction, method of, 187, 259- 
261. 

Deutsch, Gotthard, his criticism 
of Balance, 201-204 ; author's 
reply to, 261-264, 268-270. 

Dickens, Charles, quotation from 
A Tale of Two Cities, 47, 48. 

Digby, Sir K., quoted, on reac- 
tion, 15. 



Dilemmas, moral, 63. 

Diogenes, 39. 

Discoverers, the heroes of later 

centuries, 46, 47. 
Dolbear, Amos E., his criticism 

of Balance, 158-160. 
Drummond, Henry, reference to 

his work, 179, 215. 
Dualism in Nature, 41, 42, 82. 
Dunes on coast of Long Island, 

1-4, 202, 222, 223, 262, 263. 

Dut y, 77, 157- 

Earth, motion of, 12, 13. 

Ecclesiastes, quotation from, 204. 

Economic science, 130. 

Effect and cause. See Cause and 
effect. 

Elijah, the prophet, 113. 

Eliot, Samuel A., his criticism of 
Balance, 226-229. 

Emerson, quoted, on dualism in 
Nature, ^ ; on gravitation, 42 ; 
on judgment, 76 ; references to 
his Compensation, 176, 185, 189 ; 
his inexactness of definition, 
192. 

Epicureanism, 38. 

Equilibration, 249-251. 

Equilibrium, in the sense of rest, 
is unknown, 9-12 ; moving equi- 
librium, 253. 

Error, its conflict with truth, 40, 
41 ; caused by deficiency or ex- 
cess, 43 ; disguises itself as truth, 

135- 

Eternalism, references to, 15 1, 1 52, 
232. 

Evil, located in deficiency or ex- 
cess, 43. 

Evolution, principle of, 18, 19, 82. 

Excess, how curbed by Nature, 
4-7 ; even in virtue, becomes 
evil, 43 ; reaction from excess 
is excess in opposite direction, 
44-46. 



[ 



Fatalism, 68. 

Fetiches, idols, gods, 106, 109. 

First Principles, Spencer's, quo- 
tations from, on equilibration, 
249, 250. 

282 ] 



INDEX 



Fiske, John, quoted, on equilibra- 
tion, 250, 251. 

Flint, Robert, quotations from 
his Philosophy of History, 49. 

Fools, ignorant of consequences, 

57- 

Force, persistent and indestruc- 
tible, 19, 20, 28, 82, 257. 

French Revolution, 47, 48. 

Friendship, price of, 74. 

Future life. See Immortality. 

Galveston, Texas, disaster at, 202, 
261-264. 

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, her 
criticism of Balance, 182-184 ; 
author's reply to, 258, 259. 

Gladiatorial games in Rome, 44, 45. 

Goblet d'Alviella, Eugene, Comte, 
quoted, on judgment of the dead, 
105 ; on subordination, no; on 
sacrifice of immediate satisfac- 
tion to greater good, no; on 
belief in a future life, 112. 

God, attributes of, 118. 

Gold, discovery of, in California, 
49, 50. 

Golden Rule, the, 77, 157, 165. 

Gorgias, 39. 

Gravitation, 17, 18, 42, 217, 278. 

Gregory VII., tyranny of, 202. 

Guillotine, 47, 48. 

Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich, his word 

" thanatism," 141, 145. 
Hall, Thomas C, his criticism of 

Balance, 205 -207. 
Harmony, in Nature, 21, 22. 
Healing. See Medicine. 
Hebrews, their belief in spirits 

and the resurrection of the dead, 

113, 114, 204, 269, 270. 
Hegel, quoted, on " progress by 

antagonism," 34 ; reference to 

his philosophy, 205. 
Hibben, John Grier, his criticism 

of Balance, 167-170; author's 

reply to, 266, 267, 273. 
Hindu philosophy, 186, 188. 
Hippias, 39. 

History, philosophy of, 49. 
Hugo, Victor, quotation from Les 

Miserables, 48, 49. 



Human life. See Life, human. 

Huxley, T. H., quoted, on belief 
in ghosts, 112; his teaching of 
the harmony of science and re- 
ligion, 215, 216. 

Idealism, 67, 68. 

Immigration, a chart of industrial 
conditions, 49, 50. 

Immortality of the soul, founda- 
tion for hope of, 8 ; necessary 
to complete justice, 98, 166 ; a 
primitive and fundamental reli- 
gious belief, 111-115, 119, 120, 
128, 204 ; denial of, 140-143 ; 
inconclusive argument for, 152- 
154 ; provides for conservation 
of moral forces, 172, 173 ; scien- 
tific basis for belief in, 177, 
208. See also Soul. 

Innocent III., tyranny of, 202. 

Insight, sometimes anticipates 
science, 129. 

Interest, jt>' 

Io Victis, by Story, quotation 
from, 93, 94. 

Jehovah, 117. 

Jews. See Hebrews. 

Job, quotation from, 204. 

Johnston, Howard Agnew, his 
criticism of Balance, 212-214. 

Joule's principle, 28. 

Judgment, continual, 76. 

Jupiter, 117. 

Justice, first truth of morality, 7S ; 
balance in human affairs, 81, 
82 ; but incomplete in present 
life, 92-98 ; recognized in lowest 
religions, 132 ; the principle of 
necessary consequences, 157; 
effect of prevalence of, 163. 

Kant, Immanuel, his " categor- 
ical imperative," 77, 78, 157; 
his argument for immortality, 
188. 

Karma, law of, 117, 186, 187, 224. 

Kepler's law, 27, 130. 

Kidd, Benjamin, his criticism of 
Balance, 154-158. 

Knox, George William, his criti- 
cism of Balance, 185-189; au- 



[ ^3 ] 



INDEX 



thor's reply to, 259-261, 267, 
268. 

Lavoisier, founder of modern 
chemistry, 24, 25, 130. 

Law, designed to prevent excess 
or deficiency, 88 ; reference to 
early codes, 129, 130. 

Lecky, W. E. H., on brutality in 
Rome, 44 ; quoted on laws 
against sorcerers, 129, 130. 

Les Miserables, Hugo's, quota- 
tion from, 48, 49. 

Life, human, inequalities of, 92- 
98 ; form argument for immor- 
tality of the soul, 98. 

Lincoln, Abraham, permanence of 
his influence, 95 ; reference to, 
242. 

Long Island, dunes along the 
coast of, 1-4, 202, 222, 223, 262, 
263. 

Lucretius, reference to his philos- 
ophy, 155. 
Lyra, constellation of, 13. 

Macdougall, Robert, his criticism 
of Bala7ice, 178-181. 

Macquer, Pierre Joseph, 130. 

Maimonides, creed of, 114. 

Mallock, W. H., his criticism of 
Balance, 151-154, 232; au- 
thor's reply to, 235-243. 

Mangasarian, Mangasar M., his 
criticism of Balance, 160-164, 
232 ; author's reply to, 243- 
248. 

Markham, Edwin, his criticism of 
Balance, 164-167 ; reference to, 
263. 

Materialism, philosophy of, 140- 
145. 

Mathematics, principle of equiva- 
lence in, 61. 

Matter, indestructible, 19, 20. 

McGilvary, Evander B., his criti- 
cism of Balance, 174-176; au- 
thor's reply to, 252-257. 

Medicine, science of, error and 
truth in, 127, 128. 

Menippus, 39. 

Mill, John Stuart, quoted, on uni- 
formity of Nature, 260. 



Mohammed, reference to his idea 

of paradise, 203. 
Monism, 219, 220. 
Montaigne, on witchcraft, 130. 
Moral dilemmas, 63. 
Moral force more permanent than 

physical, 52, 53. 
Moral order, 158. 
Morveau, Guy ton de, 130. 
Motion, everywhere existent, 7, 

10, 11 ; ceaseless, 20, 21. 
Moxom, Philip S., his criticism 

of Balance, 207-209. 

Napoleon I., 48, 49, 95. 

Natural Law in the Spiritual 
World, Drummond's, reference 
to, 215. 

Nature, uniformity of, 260, 276, 
278. 

Newton, Sir Isaac, his Third Law 
of Motion, 16, 20-22, 28, 152, 
165, 267 ; his discovery of gravi- 
tation, 18, 32, 217, 278 ; his fame, 

95- 

Newton, R. Heber, his criticism 
of Balance, 222-226. 

Nietzsche, reference to his philos- 
ophy, 155. 

Ocean, the force of, how re- 
strained, 1-4. 

Odin, 117. 

Ohm's law, 27. 

Old Testament, teaching of, on im- 
mortality, 204. 

Omar Khayyam, reference to, 115. 

Oratory, power of, 52. 

Order, 80, 81. 

Oxidation, 25. 

Pascal's principle, 27. 

Phcedon, Plato's, reference to, 
201. 

Pharisees, their belief in the resur- 
rection, 204. 

Phenomena, physical and psychic- 
al, disparity of, 170. 

Philosophy of History, Flint's, 
quotation from, 49. 

Phlogiston, 25, 130. 

Pickpockets, 263. 

Planetary motion, 130. 



[ 284 ] 



INDEX 



Plato, quoted, on the law of con- 
traries, 33, references to, 53, 186, 
187 ; quoted, on justice, j8 ; ref- 
erence to his Phcedon, 201. 

Polarity, ^ 34- 

Political science, not fully effec- 
tive, 130. 

Porter, Noah, his definition of sci- 
ence, 217. 

Priestley, Joseph, discovered oxy- 
gen, 32 ; believed in u phlogis- 
ton," 130. 

Primitive Culture, by Tylor, quo- 
tations from, 100, 104, 105. 

Printing press, 46. 

Propitiation, 105, 106, 221. 

Prosperity, business, 50. 

Protagoras, 39. 

Public speaking. See Oratory. 

Reaction. See Action and re- 
action. 

Reasoning, province and methods 
of, 66-71. 

Reformation, the, a reaction from 
tyranny, 202. 

Religion, its universality and per-i 
manence, 99 ; varying concep- 
tions of, 1 01-103 ; fundamental 
principles of, 101-121 ; inter- 
pretation of, revealed by its own 
history, 121, 122 ; its harmony 
with science, 122, 123 ; its slow 
development, 125-133 ; misin- 
terpretation of, 134-136 ; single- 
ness of, 137 ; strength of, meas- 
ured by the weakness of its 
denial, 138-143 ; universality of, 
denied, 203, 204. 

Repulsion and attraction, 17, 
18. 

Responsibility. See Accountabil- 
ity, moral. 

Resurrection, doctrine of, in Juda- 
ism, 204. 

Retribution, doctrine of, 184. 

Reviews of Bala?ice : the Funda- 
mental Verity, 149-229. 

Rhythm in Nature, 159, 246- 
248, 250. 

Riggs, Alexander B., his criticism 
of Balance, 198-200 ; author's 
reply to, 270-272, 273. 

[ *8 5 ] 



Right, 81 ; rules the world, 121- 

123, 133, 137. 
Roget, quoted, 34; reference to, 

82. 
Rose, the, Mallock's illustration 

of, 154 ; reply to, 235-243. 

Sabatier, quoted, on man's re- 
ligious nature, 207. 

Samuel, the prophet, 113. 

Sand-dunes. See Dunes. 

Scales never weigh with infinite 
fineness, 9, 10. 

Schulman, Samuel, his criticism of 
Balance, 219-222; author's re- 
ply to, 272, 273. 

Science, nature of, 124 ; its strug- 
gle with error, 126, 127 ; slow 
development of, 1 29-131 ; de- 
fends, not antagonizes, religion, 
134 ; encourages belief in im- 
mortality, 141, 142. 

Science and religion in harmony, 
122, 123, 134, 146, 188, 196 ; 
Mangasarian's opinion on this 
question, 161-163 ; conflict of, 
in last century, 217. 

Sciences, physical, principle of 
equivalence in, 61. 

Scott, William Henry, his criticism 
of Balance, 1 70-1 73 ; acknowl- 
edgment of indebtedness to, 

234- 

Sermon on the Mount, reference 
to, 208. 

Serviss, Garrett P., his criticism 
of Balance, 176-178. 

Shakespeare, quoted, 161. 

Simeon Stylites, St., 45, 56. 

Slavery in the United States, cost 
of, 75, 76. 

Socrates, permanence of his in- 
fluence, 53 ; quoted, on future 
life, 104. 

Sophists, 39. 

Sorcerers, capital punishment of, 
129, 130. 

Soul, the, character and life of, 
235-243. See also Immortality. 

Spencer, Herbert, quoted, on evo- 
lution, 19 ; on action and re- 
action, 24 ; on immortality, 112, 
113 ; on religion, 100; his atti- 



INDEX 



tude toward immortality, 140 ; 
quoted, on equilibration, 249, 
250. 

Spinoza, his principle of religious 
toleration, 202. 

Stedman, E. C, quoted, on Long- 
fellow, 216. 

Stevens, C. Ellis, his criticism of 
Balance, 216-219. 

Stevens, George Barker, his criti- 
cism of Balance, 189-191, 232. 

Stewart, George B., his criticism 
of Balance, 191-194 ; author's 
reply to, 248-252, 275, 276. 

Stoicism, 38. 

Stone, James S., his criticism of 
Balance, 2.q><}-2.\2.. 

Story, W. W., quotation from his 
Io Victis, 93, 94. 

Strauss, David Friedrich, anecdote 
of, 201. 

Suarez, the Jesuit, reference to 
his idea of hell, 203. 

Suicide, 143, 256. 

Supernaturalism, 273, 274. 

Supreme Power, belief in, 115- 
122, 139. 

Syllogism, 67. 

Tale of Two Cities, A, Dickens's, 
quotation from, 47, 48. 

Talmud, emphasizes belief in res- 
urrection, 204. 

Telemachus, ends gladiatorial 
combats, 44. 



Tennyson, Alfred, quoted, 173. 

Thanatism. See Materialism. 

Trade, principles of, 72 ; life 
made up of buying and selling, 
73-76. 

Transformation, continuous, 20. 

Truth, its conflict with error, 40, 
41 ; excellence of, how proved, 
59, 60 ; equivalence its test, in 
science, 61. 

Tylor, Edward B., quoted, on 
universality of religion, 99, 100 ; 
on future reward and punish- 
ment, 104, 105 ; on fundamental 
beliefs, 11 1. 

Tyranny, causes and effects of, 
88-91. 

Ultimate major premiss, 260. 
Uniformity, in Nature, 21, 22, 276, 
278, 279. 

Varuna, 117. 

Voorsanger, Jacob, his criticism 
of Balance, 184, 185. 

Weighing, never infinitely fine, 

9, 10. 
Witchcraft, widespread belief in, 

130. 
World-order, right or wrong ? 87. 
Wrong, disguises itself as right, 

135- 

Zeus, 117. 



[ 286 ] 



Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton 6* Co, 
Cambridge, Mass., U.S. A. 



OCT 3 1904 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Dec. 2004 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




013 653 555 9 






SShHKL 



aSSSSSi 



khhm 



ran 



WSSBf 



mSssR 

SmdhRdHI 



rxmSSSufiSSs 



w* 



WmmM 




,■■■■•:.•.:•,.., 

nSSr 

■nnF 



